A fragile zero-watermarking technique for authentication of relational databases

The protection of databases integrity is currently a very active research field in digital watermarking. Most of the existing watermarking techniques designed for securing relational databases introduce some distortions to the underlying data during the watermark insertion process. Although these errors are claimed to be minuscule, they inevitably degrade the quality of the watermarked data. Moreover, prior database watermarking schemes are usually developed to protect specific types of data such as numeric or categorical attributes. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on zero-watermarking approach for content integrity checking of database relations. As a result, the proposed scheme does not change the content of the host data, thus resolving the inherent conflict between security and imperceptibility. Furthermore, there is no constraint on the type of attributes being watermarked. Security analysis and experimental results showed that our proposed method can detect and localized malicious data modifications with high probability.