On the Security of Chaos-Based Watermarking Scheme for Secure Communication

A new digital image watermarking scheme based on chaotic map was proposed to hide the sensitive information known as watermark. The authors claimed that the scheme is efficient, secure, and highly robust against various attacks. In this paper, the inherent security loopholes of the watermarking embedding and extraction processes are unveiled. The cryptanalysis of watermarking scheme is presented to demonstrate that the scheme is not robust and secure against the proposed attack. Specifically, with chosen host image and chosen watermarks, the successful recovery of securely embedded watermark from received watermarked image is possible without any knowledge of secret key. The simulation analysis of proposed cryptanalysis is provided to exemplify the proposed attack and lack of security of anticipated watermarking scheme.