Open Access Research Article

Breaking the BOWS Watermarking System: Key Guessing and Sensitivity Attacks

Pedro Comesaña* and Fernando Pérez-González

Author Affiliations

Signal Theory and Communications Department, University of Vigo, Vigo 36310, Spain

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EURASIP Journal on Information Security 2007, 2007:025308  doi:10.1155/2007/25308


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://jis.eurasipjournals.com/content/2007/1/025308


Received: 11 May 2007
Accepted: 31 August 2007
Published: 25 December 2007

© 2007 Comesaña and Pérez-González

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

From December 15, 2005 to June 15, 2006, the watermarking community was challenged to remove the watermark from 3 different 512×512 watermarked images while maximizing the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) measured by comparing the watermarked signals with their attacked counterparts. This challenge, which bore the inviting name of Break Our Watermarking System (BOWS), had as its main objective to enlarge the current knowledge on attacks to watermarking systems. In this paper, the main results obtained by the authors when attacking the BOWS system are presented and compared with strategies followed by other groups. Essentially, two different approaches have been followed: exhaustive search of the secret key and blind sensitivity attacks.

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