A Watermarking Framework for Outsourced and Distributed Relational Databases

Unlike centralized databases, watermarking of distributed databases faces serious challenges for various reasons, e.g. (i) Distribution of data (ii) Existence of replication (iii) Preservation of watermarks while partitioning and distributing databases, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel watermarking technique for distributed relational databases considering a generic scenario that supports database outsourcing and hybrid partitioning. Our approach addresses the above challenges in an effective way by maintaining meta-data and by making the detection phase partition independent. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first proposal on watermarking of distributed relational databases that supports database outsourcing and its partitioning and distribution in a distributed setting.