Watermarking
Watermarking has taken on a new importance in the digital era. Still images, video, music, text, and software are all easily copied and illegally distributed, causing the authors to lose out on considerable income in royalties. By embedding identifying information in a file, watermarking software enables authors to control the distribution of and to verify ownership of their digital information. It essentially "copyrights" digital information.
Unfortunately, not all watermarking software is created equal. Some watermarks are easily removed or destroyed by manipulating various characteristics of the file. StirMark and UnZign are two examples of software that can remove copyright information from files. Like many other programs which break established security mechanisms, these programs are intended to demonstrate the weakness in current algorithms so that companies will be motivated to develop more robust watermarking technologies.
Additional Info
- Watermarking World — the home of digital watermarking
- The Information Hiding Homepage (Fabien Petitcolas)
- Steganography and Digital Watermarking (Neil F. Johnson)
- Watermarking and Data Hiding (Frank Hartung)
- Watermarking Mailing List
- Watermarking Weakness — discusses attacks on current software
- Unzign and Stirmark — remove watermarks of many popular programs
- 2Mosaic — disables watermarks in jpg's by imperceptibly cutting the image into a number of smaller subimages (download)
- Steganalysis — the art of discovering steganographic data and rendering it useless
- Stego Watch™ is designed to allow users to detect digital steganography. Stego Watch is the result of a long-term, intensive research effort by WetStone, and is now available for commercial release.
- Secret Messages Come in .WAVs — WIRED article by Declan McCullagh detailing current research to uncover concealed messages embedded in sound and video files
Watermarking Systems
Note: For the most up-to-date info, please see Fabien Petitcolas and Frank Hartung's watermarking pages.
- Teletrax — Watermarks TV footage and tracks wherever broadcast
- Alpha Tec — makers of Eikonamark, Audiomark, and Videomark which watermark still images, audio and video files, respectively
- Verance Digital provides digital rights management and copy/usage control tools to owners and distributors of sound recordings (including DVD audio and SDMI), television programming and motion pictures.
- AlpVision — watermarks printed docs/photos, digital images, and CD-ROM.
- Giovanni (Bluespike) is a marking system for still images and audio
- Digimarc Plugins provide watermarking capabilities for many popular image editing programs. A companion program, MarcSpider, keeps tabs on your images as it wanders the public Web. Video watermarking also available.
- SysCoP (MediaSec) is a data-hiding and digital watermarking technology for still images, audio, and video files. Adobe plugin and a spider program are also available.
- Signum Tech watermarks still image, audio, and video files. Adobe Photoshop plugin available.
- Equitysoft, makers of H2Omarker, ImageSafe, MovieSafe, and SoundSafe. which utilize java applets to make data pirating quite difficult.
- Macrovision specializes in video, audio and computer software protection
- Datamark — enables the identification, delivery, tracking and protection of images - all in real time.
- Cryptolopes — IBM's trademark cryptographic envelope technology for secure, protected delivery of digital content.