A Persistent Public Watermarking of Relational Databases

In this paper, we propose a novel fragile and robust persistent watermarking scheme for relational databases that embeds both private and public watermarks where the former allows the owner to prove his ownership, while the latter allows any end-user to verify the correctness and originality of the data in the database without loss of strength and security. The public watermarking is based on a part of the database state which remains invariant under processing of the queries associated with the database, whereas the private watermarking is based on an appropriate form of the original database state, called abstract database, and the semantics-based properties of the data which remain invariant under processing of the associated queries.