The integrity protection of digital signals is an important task in modern applications. We propose DIPS (Data Integrity Protection of Signals), a fragile watermarking algorithm aiming to protect the integrity of sampled signals like images composed of pixels or sampled audio signals that can be divided into block units. The present paper starts with two works that propose fragile watermarking algorithms yielding high-quality watermarked objects, identifies their security vulnerabilities, and finally defines a method that embeds a compressed Message Authentication Code of each block into the LSBs of the block samples. As it modifies 2 bits per block at most, the introduced distortion is extremely low, thus resulting in a very high objective quality (PSNR). Experimental results confirming this characteristic are reported on real sampled signals such as speech, images, and ECG signals.
Botta et al. (2026) studied this question.