Open Access Research Article

Design and Analysis of the First BOWS Contest

A Piva1* and M Barni2

Author Affiliations

1 Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, University of Florence, Florence 50139, Italy

2 Department of Information Engineering, University of Siena, Siena 53100, Italy

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EURASIP Journal on Information Security 2007, 2007:098684  doi:10.1155/2007/98684


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://jis.eurasipjournals.com/content/2007/1/098684


Received: 20 June 2007
Accepted: 29 August 2007
Published: 17 October 2007

© 2007 Piva and Barni

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.

The break our watermarking system (BOWS) contest was launched in the framework of the activities carried out by the European Network of Excellence for Cryptology ECRYPT. The aim of the contest was to investigate how and when an image watermarking system can be broken while preserving the highest possible quality of the content, in the case the watermarking system is subject to a massive worldwide attack. The great number of participants and the echo that the contest has had in the watermarking community contributed to make BOWS a great success. From a scientific point of view, many insights into the problems attackers have to face with when operating in a practical scenario have been obtained, confirming the threat posed by the sensitivity attack, which turned out to be the most successful attack. At the same time, several interesting modifications of such an attack have been proposed to make it work in a real scenario under limited communication and time resources. This paper describes how the contest has been designed and analyzes the general progress of the attacks during the contest.

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