A Watermark Inspection Game for IoT Settings

Often the ownership of the information exchanged in IoT environments is protected by watermarking. Violations are tracked by enforcing, at a cost, a watermarking verification procedure. Due to this cost and other practical limits, the procedure cannot be exhaustively applied to all the information exchanged: this limit can be exploited by malicious agents. In this work, we model the watermark falsification and the watermark verification process, under classical Game Theory assumptions, as a three-player inspection game: the players are the legitimate owner of the information, or licensee, the potential illegitimate holder of the information (the peers) and an inspector. We compute the rate of violation of the rule and the rate of inspection at equilibrium. We also compare the game with similar three player inspection games and show that, under the adopted assumptions, the two peers do not have any incentive in setting up a coalition.