Content based Zero-Watermarking Algorithm for Authentication of Text Documents

Copyright protection and authentication of digital contents has become a significant issue in the current digital epoch with efficient communication mediums such as internet. Plain text is the rampantly used medium used over the internet for information exchange and it is very crucial to verify the authenticity of information. There are very limited techniques available for plain text watermarking and authentication. This paper presents a novel zero-watermarking algorithm for authentication of plain text. The algorithm generates a watermark based on the text contents and this watermark can later be extracted using extraction algorithm to prove the authenticity of text document. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm against tampering attacks identifying watermark accuracy and distortion rate on 10 different text samples of varying length and attacks. Keywords-watermarking; copyright protection; authentication; security; algorithm