A robust technique for relational database watermarking and verification

Outsourcing of data is increasing with the rapid growth of internet. There is every possibility that data reaches illegal hands. As a result, there is increase in illegal copying of data, piracy, illegal redistribution, forgery and theft. Watermarking technology is a solution for these challenges. It addresses the ownership problem. It deters illegal copying and protects copyright of data. Watermarking technology mainly involves the process of watermark insertion and watermark extraction. Watermark insertion means embedding an imperceptible watermark in the relational database. In watermark extraction we extract the embedded watermark without the help of original database. In this paper we propose a new watermarking technique, which will watermark both textual and numerical data. Our proposed method also does watermark verification where, the watermark extracted from the database is compared with the original watermark that is known only to the owner of the database. This is accomplished through Levenshtein distance algorithm.