Abstract
•Research proposes an invisible watermarking for copyrights protection of online author.•It is based on zero watermarking; watermarks are constructed based on the textual content of a webpage.•Predefined rules are used to formulate watermarks which are secured by HASH-MD5 algorithm.•Watermarks are fixed length of 8-digits, further converted into whitespaces using memory binary controlled characters.•Invisible watermarks are embedded into a webpage using the structural means of HTML.
Digital watermarking is a copyright protection technique used to embed specific data in a cover file to prevent illegal use. In this research invisible digital watermarking based on the text information contained in a webpage has been proposed. Watermarks are based on predefined semantic and syntactic rules, which are encrypted and then converted into whitespace using binary controlled characters before embedding into a webpage. Structural means of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) are used as a cover file to embed the formulated watermarks. Proposed system has been validated against various attacks to find optimum robustness.