DataSafe: Copyright Protection with PUF Watermarking and Blockchain Tracking

TL;DR

DataSafe integrates PUFs and blockchain to enhance digital copyright protection, ensuring secure watermarking, ownership verification, and traceability through a decentralized, tamper-proof system.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel scheme combining PUFs and blockchain for secure digital watermarking and copyright transfer, with a practical prototype implementation.

Findings

Effective watermark embedding and verification within devices

Blockchain-based traceability of copyright transfers

Prototype demonstrates practicality and security

Abstract

Digital watermarking methods are commonly used to safeguard digital media copyrights by confirming ownership and deterring unauthorized use. However, without reliable third-party oversight, these methods risk security vulnerabilities during watermark extraction. Furthermore, digital media lacks tangible ownership attributes, posing challenges for secure copyright transfer and tracing. This study introduces DataSafe, a copyright protection scheme that combines physical unclonable functions (PUFs) and blockchain technology. PUF devices use their unique fingerprints for blockchain registration. Subsequently, these devices incorporate invisible watermarking techniques to embed digital watermarks into media for copyright protection. The watermark verification process is confined within the devices, preserving confidentiality during extraction, validating identities during copyright exchanges, and facilitating blockchain-based traceability of copyright transfers. The implementation of a prototype system on the LPC55S69-EVK development board is detailed, illustrating the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed solution.