Blackbox Approach for Stealthy Watermark Identification in Image Files

Information technology has been relied upon to generate and disseminate information. Digital multimedia files are a widely used format for creating and distributing such information due to the development of digital multimedia and the desire for rich content. Meanwhile, the number of crimes that involve the use of digital technology is rising. This has changed how judges, lawyers, and detectives use digital evidence in court cases and other legal proceedings. This paper proposes a technique for creating persistent, stealthy, and benign tagging data in digital files. This technique has been used for the first time with PNG files. The technique used in this work differs from current steganographic and cryptographic techniques because the non-algorithmic technique was used to find patterns of candidate file locations for inserting our digital tagging data. We discovered that 66.54% of the inserted tagged data was preserved when we edited and saved our test image files. Additional investigations indicated that concealed data in identified areas persists when picture files are opened, closed, terminated, saved without modification, and copied.