On the Security of a Revised Fragile Watermarking Scheme

TL;DR

This paper critically examines a revised fragile watermarking scheme, revealing a new low-resource attack that compromises its tamper detection capabilities, thereby questioning its security effectiveness.

Contribution

It introduces a novel attack method that can forge valid watermarks on tampered images, exposing vulnerabilities in the revised scheme.

Findings

The attack can be executed with low computational resources.

The scheme's tamper detection can be bypassed using the attack.

The security of the revised watermarking scheme is compromised.

Abstract

This paper analyzes a revised fragile watermarking scheme proposed by Botta et al. which was developed as a revision of the watermarking scheme previously proposed by Rawat et al. A new attack is presented that allows an attacker to apply a valid watermark on tampered images, therefore circumventing the protection that the watermarking scheme under study was supposed to offer. Furthermore, the presented attack has very low computational and memory requirements.