Semi-structured data protection scheme based on robust watermarking

Semi-structured data is a widely used text format for data interchange and storage. This paper proposes a robust watermarking scheme of data protection for semi-structured data, which uses JSON format as an example for illustration. We first parse JSON file into a data structure of distinct pairs. Afterwards, we generate a transfer matrix to get the intermediate sequences, which are then encoded using error-correction codes and embedded into the pairs. A private key is shared by the data hider and the recipient to resist collusion attacks. On the recipient’s side, data extraction can be successfully carried out even the received stego data are tampered. The imperceptibility is realized by embedding data into the less significant digits of numeric data in the cover file. The proposed scheme can be extended on several other formats. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme is robust to various kinds of typical attacks such as contextual truncating, modification, and redundancy addition.