The development of steganography, a science that studies the problems of concealing the fact of the transmission of a secret message, has led to the creation of methods for protecting copyright objects. So, does Data Room use dynamic watermarks to keep data safe?
What is a dynamic watermark?
When creating and maintaining digital content, one of the important issues is copyright protection. It is known that commercial organizations incur significant losses due to unauthorized copying, distribution, and illegal borrowing of a protected digital object.
The concept of digital watermarks is more general and includes the solution of problems of identification of the author and control of the integrity of a data object or its fragments. In the case of software, integrity control allows the end-user to ensure that they are using an application that is not corrupted by malware.
Among all image formats, only GIF supports the ability to create animations. The GIF format supports the exchange of not only graphics but also various multimedia data. GIF animation uses the ability of the GIF format to store multiple images in a file. In this case, a dynamic watermark is a perfect alternative.
As a rule, the introduction of a digital watermark is carried out in the area of the original image without the use of cumbersome calculations and due to certain transformations of the image brightness and color components of the image (r, g, b). It should be noted that one of the important stages of building a stegosystem is to determine the optimal size of the digital water center, which can be embedded in the original document without reducing the reliability of the system. In cases where it is not possible to determine the optimal size of the embedded digital water center and there are suspicions that the reliability of the stegosystem will be reduced, it is assumed that it is possible to resort to introducing “side noise” into the document, for example, additional points.
Dynamic watermarks in the Virtual Data Room
Dynamic watermarks, unlike static ones, cannot be read without directly launching the software; they are stored in a certain state of the program while it is running. The general idea is that in order to gain access to a specific digital watermark, the program needs to input some predetermined sequence of data, which translates it into the desired state from which information can be extracted.
Today there are many programs for applying a watermark to dynamic images and videos. Besides, the PDF file format is very important when transferring confidential documents in the Data Room that require rights management protection. Thus, the Data Room watermark module allows you to programmatically quickly add text or image-based watermarks to a large number of PDF files. It includes:
- Support for image-based and text-based watermarks.
- Customize and preview watermarks through the GUI customization tool.
- Export watermarks to XML files.
- The selectable font style for text, font size, underline, bold, and color.
- Adjust transparency, page range, and scale.
- Determines the location of the watermark in the document.
- The location of the watermark above or below the content of the document.
Among the virtual-data-room.org that have dynamic watermark modules, there are:
- iDeals
- Intralinks
- DealRoom
- Drooms
- Ansarada
- Box
- Merill
- Citrix.
Besides, the Data Room watermark can be not only a way to identify the owner, but also store inside the program itself, for example, the history of its development. For this, it would be very useful not only to add digital watermarks one-time but also to be able to modify them.