The Research of a Method to Identify a Workplace via a Monitor Snapshot

Digital technologies progress along with their ease of use, convenience and popularity inevitably leads to an increase in the number of cases of unauthorized copying of confidential information. Thus the popularity of photo and video recording digital devices has led to unregistered information leakage from the monitors of employees’ workplaces. Modern mobile devices send photos almost instantly over social networks, taking information outside the organization’s information space. The more numerous staff the harder is non-trivial task to prevent the leakage. The common solution is in applying special organizational and technical protection measures. Experience shows that these measures are quite effective, but not absolute. In this case, identifying the terminal from which the photo was taken would help not eliminate the leakage channel, but to establish the source at least. Since the terminal screen snapshot is taken by a device which is not wired to the workstation equipment, it is impossible to embed metadata on the place and time of registration in the recorded data. Consequently, one of the most effective ways to identify a terminal screen on a photo is to implant a digital watermark into the image displayed on a screen. Basically, watermarks protect the copyright of multimedia files. The paper considers implementing watermarks as a method to identify employees’ workplaces via monitor snapshots with mainly text information. Also we present the results of an experimental test of the method imperceptibility and robustness