DLOVE: A new Security Evaluation Tool for Deep Learning Based Watermarking Techniques

TL;DR

This paper introduces DLOVE, a novel adversarial attack method that overwrites watermarks in deep learning-based watermarking techniques, revealing vulnerabilities and serving as a benchmark for future security evaluations.

Contribution

The paper presents DLOVE, the first attack leveraging adversarial machine learning to overwrite watermarks, and proposes it as a standard tool for security assessment of watermarking methods.

Findings

DLOVE successfully overwrites watermarks across seven different techniques.

Deep learning-based watermarking techniques are vulnerable to the DLOVE attack.

Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of DLOVE in various scenarios.

Abstract

Recent developments in Deep Neural Network (DNN) based watermarking techniques have shown remarkable performance. The state-of-the-art DNN-based techniques not only surpass the robustness of classical watermarking techniques but also show their robustness against many image manipulation techniques. In this paper, we performed a detailed security analysis of different DNN-based watermarking techniques. We propose a new class of attack called the Deep Learning-based OVErwriting (DLOVE) attack, which leverages adversarial machine learning and overwrites the original embedded watermark with a targeted watermark in a watermarked image. To the best of our knowledge, this attack is the first of its kind. We have considered scenarios where watermarks are used to devise and formulate an adversarial attack in white box and black box settings. To show adaptability and efficiency, we launch our DLOVE attack analysis on seven different watermarking techniques, HiDDeN, ReDMark, PIMoG, Stegastamp, Aparecium, Distortion Agostic Deep Watermarking and Hiding Images in an Image. All these techniques use different approaches to create imperceptible watermarked images. Our attack analysis on these watermarking techniques with various constraints highlights the vulnerabilities of DNN-based watermarking. Extensive experimental results validate the capabilities of DLOVE. We propose DLOVE as a benchmark security analysis tool to test the robustness of future deep learning-based watermarking techniques.