New sensitivity analysis attack

The sensitivity analysis attacks by Kalker et al. constitute a known family of watermark removal attacks exploiting a vulnerability in some watermarking protocols: the attacker’s unlimited access to the watermark detector. In this paper, a new attack on spread spectrum schemes is designed. We first examine one of Kalker’s algorithms and prove its convergence using the law of large numbers, which gives more insight into the problem. Next, a new algorithm is presented and compared to existing ones. Various detection algorithms are considered including correlation detectors and normalized correlation detectors, as well as other, more complicated algorithms. Our algorithm is noniterative and requires at most n + 1 operations, where n is the dimension of the signal. Moreover, the new approach directly estimates the watermark by exploiting the simple geometry of the detection boundary and the information leaked by the detector.