A Fragile Watermarking Technique for Integrity Authentication of CSV-Files Using Invisible Line-Ending Control Characters

Florian Zimmer, Malte Hellmeier, Motoki Nakamura, Tobias Urbanek

2025

Abstract

Every day, a growing amount of data, including audio, video, images, and plain text, is published and shared online. Facilitating its interoperable exchange, a range of standards and formats has emerged, establishing common ground. Among plain text formats, CSV prevails as one of the most used text formats. However, being a simplistic, plain text format, it lacks built-in security measures. Consequently, data users cannot authenticate the integrity of CSV texts they receive. A recognised method in research for ensuring text integrity is fragile watermarking. Accordingly, numerous watermarking techniques are available for tamper detection. However, many of these methods are either incompatible with the CSV format or visible to the human eye. To address these shortcomings, we propose a novel fragile watermarking technique for CSV files. Using invisible line-ending control characters, we are able to embed any byte-encodable information into a CSV cover text, making it truly imperceptible. We evaluated our technique by conducting three experiments to benchmark robustness, capacity and imperceptibility and comparing it with existing solutions. We found that our technique successfully achieves complete imperceptibility in all cases. However, a limited capacity and line-ending normalisation sensitivity must be considered when applying it.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Zimmer F., Hellmeier M., Nakamura M. and Urbanek T. (2025). A Fragile Watermarking Technique for Integrity Authentication of CSV-Files Using Invisible Line-Ending Control Characters. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT; ISBN 978-989-758-760-3, SciTePress, pages 455-466. DOI: 10.5220/0013559600003979

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt25,
author={Florian Zimmer and Malte Hellmeier and Motoki Nakamura and Tobias Urbanek},
title={A Fragile Watermarking Technique for Integrity Authentication of CSV-Files Using Invisible Line-Ending Control Characters},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT},
year={2025},
pages={455-466},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013559600003979},
isbn={978-989-758-760-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT
TI - A Fragile Watermarking Technique for Integrity Authentication of CSV-Files Using Invisible Line-Ending Control Characters
SN - 978-989-758-760-3
AU - Zimmer F.
AU - Hellmeier M.
AU - Nakamura M.
AU - Urbanek T.
PY - 2025
SP - 455
EP - 466
DO - 10.5220/0013559600003979
PB - SciTePress