MetaSeal: Defending Against Image Attribution Forgery Through Content-Dependent Cryptographic Watermarks

The rapid growth of digital and AI-generated images has amplified the need for secure and verifiable methods of image attribution. While digital watermarking offers more robust protection than metadata-based approaches–which can be easily stripped–current watermarking techniques remain vulnerable to forgery, creating risks of misattribution that can damage the reputations of AI model developers and the rights of digital artists. The vulnerabilities of digital watermarking arise from two key issues: (1) content-agnostic watermarks, which, once learned or leaked, can be transferred across images to fake attribution, and (2) reliance on detector-based verification, which is unreliable since detectors can be tricked. We present MetaSeal, a novel framework for content-dependent watermarking with cryptographic security guarantees to safeguard image attribution. Our design provides (1) $\mathbf{\text{forgery}}\mathbf{\text{resistance}}$, preventing unauthorized replication and enforcing cryptographic verification; (2) $\mathbf{\text{robust}}\mathbf{\text{self-contained}}\mathbf{\text{protection}}$, embedding attribution directly into images while maintaining robustness against benign transformations; and (3) $\mathbf{\text{evidence}}\mathbf{\text{of}}\mathbf{\text{tampering}}$, making malicious alterations visually detectable. Experiments demonstrate that MetaSeal effectively mitigates forgery attempts and applies to both natural and AI-generated images, establishing a new standard for secure image attribution. Code is available at: https://github.com/Tongzhou0101/MetaSeal.