[VeritatisSplendor]

The theory is definitely on my side here. All the papers you cite describe attacks that would not work against the recommended steganographic method in the paper I cite; furthermore, there are strong theoretical reasons for thinking that no other computationally feasible attack would work either.

It's not simply a symmetrical arms race. In ordinary cryptography, the code-makers left the code-breakers in the dust many years ago, and the same thing is happening in steganography for the same underlying mathematical reasons.

[general_re]

All the papers you cite describe attacks that would not work against the recommended steganographic method in the paper I cite

Why, because it's encrypted? The last paper I linked directly addresses spatial spread-spectrum watermarks...

It's not simply a symmetrical arms race. In ordinary cryptography, the code-makers left the code-breakers in the dust many years ago, and the same thing is happening in steganography for the same underlying mathematical reasons.

LOL. I could talk about how differential cryptanalysis made the codebreaker's job a little bit easier, or how everyone was just sure that the quadratic sieve was the fastest factorization method until Pollard came up with the number field sieve, but I'll merely suggest an analogy, so that we can think outside the box for a moment....

The government is easily the biggest, best-funded research organization in the world of cryptography. Easily. And, of course, the most secure, most difficult-to-crack ciphers are put to work by the military, so that they might communicate without anyone eavesdropping.

And yet, for all that, from 1967 to 1985, the Soviets were able to read virtually every single secure message that the US Navy sent. And it only cost them a few hundred thousand dollars to do it, whereas it cost the Navy well over a billion dollars to fix the problem once they discovered it.

So, how much will the keys to your watermarks be worth? Will it even be as much as a few hundred thousand dollars? If someone can be found who will sell out an entire nation for a few hundred thousand dollars, how much will it take to entice someone to sell out an organization as degenerately awful as a record label?

I have my doubts as to the practical invulnerability of any watermarking method - the RIAA can't even keep its own website up, after all - never mind the theoretical invulnerability. In the end, the codebreakers always have an ace up their sleeves. You can hide your data any way you see fit, and encrypt it any way you like, using any method(s) you want, but if it's important enough to me, I'll always be able to get at it, no matter what you do. The stronger the cryptography becomes, the weaker the human links become, relatively speaking...