EURASIP Journal on Information Security 
Volume 2007 (2007), Article ID 98684, 8 pages
doi:10.1155/2007/98684
Research Article

Design and Analysis of the First BOWS Contest

A. Piva1 and M. Barni2

 1Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, University of Florence, Florence 50139, Italy
2Department of Information Engineering, University of Siena, Siena 53100, Italy
Received 20 June 2007; Accepted 29 August 2007

Recommended by F. Pérez-González

Abstract

The break our watermarking system (BOWS) contest was launched in the framework of the activities carried out by the European Network of Excellence for Cryptology ECRYPT. The aim of the contest was to investigate how and when an image watermarking system can be broken while preserving the highest possible quality of the content, in the case the watermarking system is subject to a massive worldwide attack. The great number of participants and the echo that the contest has had in the watermarking community contributed to make BOWS a great success. From a scientific point of view, many insights into the problems attackers have to face with when operating in a practical scenario have been obtained, confirming the threat posed by the sensitivity attack, which turned out to be the most successful attack. At the same time, several interesting modifications of such an attack have been proposed to make it work in a real scenario under limited communication and time resources. This paper describes how the contest has been designed and analyzes the general progress of the attacks during the contest.