Unforgeable watermarking schemes with public extraction

Abstract

© 2018, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. A watermarking scheme consists of a marking algorithm allowing one to embed some information into a program while preserving its functionality and an extraction algorithm enabling one to extract embedded information from a marked program. The main security properties of watermarking schemes include unremovability and unforgeability. However, all current watermarking schemes achieving both properties simultaneously require the extraction algorithm to access either the marking secret key or the latest state maintained by the marking algorithm. As a result, to extract information embedded in a marked program, one must communicate with a third party. This greatly limits the applicability of current watermarking schemes. In this paper, we solve this problem by presenting the first (stateless) publicly extractable watermarking scheme with unremovability and unforgeability.