IACR News item: 23 April 2015
Aloni Cohen, Justin Holmgren, Vinod Vaikuntanathan
ePrint ReportWe show that slightly relaxing the functionality requirement gives us strong positive results for watermarking. Namely, instead of requiring the marked program to agree with the original unmarked program on all inputs, we require only that they agree on a large fraction of inputs. With this relaxation in mind, our contributions are as follows.
1. We define publicly verifiable watermarking where marking a program requires a secret key, but anyone can verify that a program is marked. The handful of existing watermarking schemes are secretly verifiable, and moreover, satisfy only a weak definition where the ad- versary is restricted in the type of unmarked programs it is allowed to produce (Naccache, Shamir and Stern, PKC 1999; Nishimaki, EUROCRYPT 2013). Moreover, our definition requires security against chosen program attacks, where an adversary has access to an oracle that marks programs of her choice.
2. We construct a publicly verifiable watermarking scheme for any family of puncturable pseudo-random functions (PPRF), assuming indistinguishability obfuscation and injective one-way functions.
We also give an indication of the limits of watermarking by showing that the existence of robust totally unobfuscatable families of functions rules out a general watermarking scheme for cryptographic functionalities such as signatures and MACs.
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