Constructing a virtual primary key for fingerprinting relational data

Agrawal and Kiernan’s watermarking technique for database relations [1] and Li et al’s fingerprinting extension [6] both depend critically on primary key attributes. Hence, those techniques cannot embed marks in database relations without primary key attributes. Further, the techniques are vulnerable to simple attacks that alter or delete the primary key attribute. This paper proposes a new fingerprinting scheme that does not depend on a primary key attribute. The scheme constructs virtual primary keys from the most significant bits of some of each tuple’s attributes. The actual attributes that are used to construct the virtual primary key differ from tuple to tuple. Attribute selection is based on a secret key that is known to the merchant only. Further, the selection does not depend on an apriori ordering over the attributes, or on knowledge of the original relation or fingerprint codeword. The virtual primary keys are then used in fingerprinting as in previous work [6]. ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: DRM
• Authors: Yingjiu Li, Vipin Swarup, Sushil Jajodia
• Keywords: DRM 2003, Primary Key Attribute, Primary Keys, Virtual Primary Keys