Table of Contents

• About
• Documentation
• Structure
• Getting Started
  • System Prerequisites
  • Quick Start
• Contributing
• License
• Developers

About

The Traceability Enforcement of Datatransfers (TREND) project aims to address some of the current challenges in implementing data sovereignty solutions on a broader scale. The objective is to use state-of-the-art digital watermarking techniques to embed metadata securely in the data being exchanged, along with dedicated protocol-level checks for validation and enforcement. This enables system-independent sovereignty checks to secure the data assets of the data owner without privacy sacrifices.

This repository includes a generic steganography / watermarking library to hide any byte encoded data in a cover text including two usage examples of a webinterface and command line tool. The following example shows how the webinterface includes the watermark "Fraunhofer ISST" inside a Lorem ipsum dummy cover text and extracts it afterward:

[!NOTE] There is a pending German patent application with the application number 10 2023 125 012.4. In order to use the TREND watermarker Software in the form published here, a patent license is required in addition to the license for the Software. See LICENSE for more information. In case of any questions or uncertainties, please contact us at trend@isst.fraunhofer.de.

Documentation

All information from usage until development are collected and provided in our documentation.

Structure

This project uses a monolithic repository approach and consists of different parts, located in different subfolders. The hearth is a watermarker library, located in the watermarker folder, used by other components like a CLI tool or a webinterface shipped with this repo. Every part has its own README file to get further information.

Subfolder overview:

• cli: A command line tool to enable watermarking directly via a shell
• docs: The documentation based on Docusaurus
• samples: Different examples of watermarked and non-watermarked files
• watermarker: The main part of the repository, consisting of a watermarker library to be able to watermark (for example) text files
• webinterface: A frontend / GUI to use the watermarking inside a browser

Getting Started

Detailed getting started guides are described for every component in their dedicated README file, located in the corresponding subfolders. In the following, an easy start of the webinterface with the watermarker library is described.

System Prerequisites

The following things are needed to run this application:

• docker & docker-compose

Quick Start

To run the webinterface, just clone the repo locally and run the docker-compose.yml file in the root directory of the project:

$ git clone https://github.com/FraunhoferISST/TREND.git
$ cd TREND
$ docker-compose up

After the startup finished, try to visit the webinterface at http://localhost:8080

Contributing

Contributions to this project are greatly appreciated! Every contribution needs to accept the Corporate Contributor License Agreement, located in the CLA.md file. For more details, see the CONTRIBUTING.md file.

License

This work is licensed under the Fraunhofer License (on the basis of the MIT license). See LICENSE file for more information.

The initial project version was created within the scope of the Center of Excellence Logistics and It.

Developers

• Malte Hellmeier (Fraunhofer ISST)
• Haydar Qarawlus (Fraunhofer ISST)
• Hendrik Norkowski (Fraunhofer ISST)
• Ernst-Christoph Schrewe (Fraunhofer ISST)