Data Authentication and Dissemination using Watermarking for Net-Centric Operations

The Global Information Grid will require new IA technologies to be developed before it can reach its full potential and before the complete IA architecture can be realized. Existing security technologies and standards are inherently loosely coupled with the information they protect. There exists a temporal constraint on the extent to which data can be protected since, at some point, sensitive or protected content will be stored, viewed, or processed when it is outside of the protective boundaries of encryption, signing, and other security mechanisms. We propose to deploy watermarking technologies to the Information Assurance domain in order to tightly couple security attributes with data. Our approach is to adapt existing watermarking algorithms such that they can be deployed within an enterprise system to fulfill integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation services. It is envisaged that using watermarks to bind security services to data will extend the Information Assurance capabilities of a system beyond what is current deployed today.