Techniques with Statistics for Web Page Watermarking

Information hiding, especially watermarking is a promising technique for the protection of intellectual property rights. This technology is mainly advanced for multimedia but the same has not been done for text. Web pages, like other documents, need a protection against piracy. In this paper, some techniques are proposed to show how to hide information in web pages using some features of the markup language used to describe these pages. Most of the techniques proposed here use the white space to hide information or some varieties of the language in representing elements. Experiments on a very small page and analysis of five thousands web pages show that these techniques have a wide bandwidth available for information hiding, and they might form a solid base to develop a robust algorithm for web page watermarking.




References:
[1] J. Nagra, C. Thomborson, and C. Collberg, "A functional taxonomy for
software watermarking," In M. J. Oudshoorn, Twenty-Fifth Australasian
Computer Science Conference (ACSC2002), Melbourne, Australia,
2002. ACS.
[2] Radu Sion, Mikhail Atallah, and Sunil Prabhakar, "Rights protection for
relational data," SIGMOD Conference 2003: 98-109.
[3] Shingo Inoue, Kyoko Makino, Ichiro Murase, Osamu Takizawa,
Tsutomu Matsumoto, and Hiroshi Nakagawa, "A proposal on
information hiding methods using XML," 1st Workshop on NLP and
XML, Nov.2001.
[4] Rick Darnell, HTML Unleashed, Sams.net Publishing, August 1997.
Available: http://www.webreference.com/dlab/books/html/. Chapter 3.
[5] The Sharpened.net Computer and Internet Glossary. Available:
http://www.sharpened.net/glossary/, (last visit: May 20, 2005).
[6] W3C Recommendation, HTML Specification 4.01. Available:
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/, (May 20, 2005).
[7] D. Curran, N.J. Hurley, and M. O. Cinneide, "Securing Java through
software watermarking," In Proceedings of the 2nd international
conference on Principles and practice of programming in Java, pages
311-324, 2003.
[8] Christian Collberg and Clark Thomborson, "Software watermarking:
models and dynamic embeddings," In Proceedings of Symposium on
Principles of Programming Languages, POPL'99, pages 311-324, 1999.