Toward protecting the integrity of relational databases

Relational databases are widely used in wide spectrum of commercial applications e.g., payroll, inventory, students grades, etc. Relational tables usually contain critical information. Unauthorized changes to databases can have serious consequences and may result in significant losses for the organization. This paper proposes a viable solution for protecting the integrity of the data stored in relational databases using fragile watermarking. Prior techniques for watermarking relational tables use secure hash to create a watermark that is stored in the least significant bits of some of the attributes. These techniques introduce distortions to the watermarked values and thus cannot be applied to all attributes. The proposed technique watermarks relational tables by reordering tuples relative to each other according to a secrete value. The proposed watermark does not affect the values of the attributes neither the size of the data.