Digital identification using steganography, can it be broken?
I have read a few articles saying that using an I.D. embedded in video, audio, etc can help track down the origin of a copyright violation. OK, then they said it can't be broken, so I got that "I'm gonna do it, just to prove you wrong" feeling and here I am.
I know a little about video and images from working with the OpenCV library. I know OpenCV kind of simplifies things, but in essence an image is a matrix with each coordinate being a pixel, or rather a set of RGB values or a similar set of values representing the pixel's color.
So from what I have gathered, in steganography ia smaller piece of data is embedded through-out the image or video and is used for various purposes. Now, I am assuming that the data is spread out bit-wise within the RGB values of the image or even multiple images in a video, which could be used to identify the source of a copyright infringement. That's all fine and good, just don't tell me I can't break it.
So say in theory I was going to pirate a movie. If I ran the the video and each frame through an algorithm that would add or subtract a random value within a given range that would not distort the quality of the video beyond an acceptable amount, that should completely distort the hidden I.D. — correct?
Would reformatting the image to a format that used something other than the simple RGB values in each pixel also aid in distorting the I.D. beyond recognition?