A watermarking infrastructure for enterprise document management

Digital watermarking is a promising technology to embed copyright information as unperceivable signals in digital contents. Although various watermarking techniques have been employed extensively for protecting rights of multimedia digital contents over the Internet, their applications in the management of enterprise documents have not been studied comprehensively. In this paper, we present a novel watermark-based document distribution protocol, which complements conventional access control techniques, to address a common problem in large enterprises, where document management policies are not properly reinforced. For instance, sensitive documents are often left behind in common areas, printing rooms or public folders in an enterprise. The reinforcement of document management policies requires a concrete support of nonrepudiation in the document distribution protocol. The protocol is adapted from our previous works on watermarking protocols, which defend unethical distribution of digital contents over the Internet. Our protocol makes use of registration certificates to distribute the identity information of the content-end users. We also present an implementation outline summarizing our access policy model, document check-in and check-out mechanism, and watermarking scheme employed.