Maitrik Shah

Packet Watermarking Using Ip Options Field Maitrik Shah

Watermarking is defined as the art and science of embedding information in some cover. It takes one piece of information and embeds it within another. Mostly digital data is used for embedding. In this paper, we present a way to embed this digital information into the data packet. TCP/IP packets are transmitted over a network in large quantity. Within TCP/IP header there are number of fields that are not used for normal transmission or are ?optional? which reveals many possibilities where data can be stored and transmitted. Options field of IP header is one of those fields. By embedding information in the options field of IP packet, we can make use of unused field of the IP header and can transmit our digital data within TCP/IP packets. One advantage of transmitting data in the header is that intruders will not have any idea that data is transmitted in the header, intruders will concentrate only on the payload of the packet. In order to implement this idea we will make our packet(which contains hidden data)to look like as normal packet(which does not contain hidden data) so that intruders will not be able to identify that our packet contains hidden data.