A Novel Watermarking Scheme for Secure Relational Databases

Digital watermarking for relational databases emerged as a candidate solution to provide copyright protection and tamper detection and to maintain the integrity of data. Sectors such as defense, finance, and human resources require reliable schemes, especially for data alteration and integrity checking. Many watermarking techniques have been proposed in the literature to address the above-mentioned problems subject to their limitations on numeric attributes. However, these techniques do not yield satisfactory results in the case of small numeric values. To overcome these limitations, we have proposed a watermarking scheme in which the third most significant bit of numeric and nonnumeric attributes is replaced with the watermark bit without loss of originality. The proposed scheme must be suitable for the above-mentioned sectors, including commercial banks where fraud and forgery cases are common.