Counterfeiting attacks on oblivious block-wise independent invisible watermarking schemes

In this paper, we describe a class of attacks on certain block-based oblivious watermarking schemes. We show that oblivious watermarking techniques that embed information into a host image in a block-wise independent fashion are vulnerable to a counterfeiting attack. Specifically, given a watermarked image, one can forge the watermark it contains into another image without knowing the secret key used for watermark insertion and in some cases even without explicitly knowing the watermark. We demonstrate successful implementations of this attack on a few water-marking techniques that have been proposed in the literature. We also describe a possible solution to this problem of block-wise independence that makes our attack computationally intractable.