Teaching multimedia data protection through an international online competition

Low-cost personal computers, wireless access technologies, the Internet, and computer-equipped classrooms allow the design of novel and complementary methodologies for teaching digital information security in electrical engineering curricula. The challenges of the current digital information era require experts who are effectively able to counteract piracy, forgery, copyright infringement, and so on. Digital watermarking is one possible technique for fighting piracy, which consists of the insertion of invisible but robust information to protect the data. In this paper, a new teaching approach, designed for testing student skills and progressing in multimedia data protection, is presented. This consists of a distributed security game where students compete by first using the developed watermarking techniques and then attacking each other's methods, thus verifying their robustness. Groups of students from different universities and countries play against each other, trying to compromise other teams' hiding systems while protecting their own data from attacks. The proposed methodology can be considered as an appealing approach for stimulating learning, cooperation, and team competition. The effectiveness of the teaching method is verified by a student survey and their academic results. © 2010 IEEE.