Blind Newton sensitivity attack

Abstract

Until now, the sensitivity attack was considered as a serious threat to the robustness and security of spread-spectrum-based schemes, since it provides a practical method of removing watermarks with minimum attacking distortion. Nevertheless, it had not been used to remove the watermark from other watermarking algorithms, such as those which use side-information. Furthermore, the sensitivity attack has never been used to obtain falsely watermarked contents, also known as forgeries. In this paper a new version of the sensitivity attack based on a general formulation is proposed; this method does not require any knowledge about the detection function nor any other system parameter, but just the binary output of the detector, being suitable for attacking most known watermarking methods. The new approach is validated with experiments.