Re: Applied watermarks explained to moronic profs worldwide.

[Dave Aitel <dave () immunitysec com>]

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Mordy Ovits wrote:

| On Monday 12 January 2004 10:51 pm, Dave Aitel wrote:
|
|> It would be funnier, but there are Ph.D.s and information
|> security professionals making the exact same mistake and
|> publishing papers and giving courses in steganography and digital
|>  watermarking everywhere you look.
|
|
| While your point about about their efforts addressing the wrong
| threat model is valid, there are purposes for watermarking other
| than proving who purchased a file.  For example, Playboy watermarks
| their images to allow for easy robotic crawling of the web looking
| for infringing copies of their photos.  This is, of course, mostly
| futile and as effective as pushing back the tide with a spoon.  But
| it did cause some webmasters to split up their images into separate
| files and reassemble them on-screen using HTML tables to avoid the
| ever-watchful Sentinel:
| http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?name=Sentinel+Returns
|
Which is a bizarre way to solve the problem. A watermark is defined as
something hard or impossible for the human eye to see, whereas the
thing you are trying to protect is exactly that which the human eye
can see. A edge detection fingerprint is easy, fast, and a better
solution overall.

- -dave



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