Shattering the Rings: Reproducibility and Vulnerability Analysis of the ZoDiac Watermarking Framework

TMLR Paper6050 Authors

Abstract:

This paper presents a reproducibility study and robustness evaluation of the paper ‘Attack-
Resilient Image Watermarking Using Stable Diffusion’ by Zhang et al. (2024), which proposes
ZoDiac, a Stable Diffusion-based framework for attack-resilient image watermarking. While
successfully replicating the original method’s core claims—achieving >90% watermark de-
tection rate (WDR) against diffusion-based regeneration attacks and across MS-COCO,
DiffusionDB, and WikiArt datasets—we identify critical vulnerabilities under adversarial
and geometrically asymmetric attack paradigms. Our extended analysis demonstrates that
gradient-based adversarial perturbations reduce ZoDiac’s WDR, a threat model absent in
prior evaluations. We also investigate rotationally asymmetric attacks achieving WDR be-
low 65%. Additionally, we explore a new loss function to mitigate these limitations. Despite
these enhancements, composite attacks combining adversarial noise with other methods re-
duce WDR to near-zero, exposing vulnerabilities through multi-stage offensive pipelines.
Our implementation can be found on Anonymous Github.

Submission Type: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)

Previous TMLR Submission Url: https://openreview.net/forum?id=xoQV6kdTqG

Changes Since Last Submission:

Summary of Revisions
- **Enhanced Contextualization and Literature Review**: The manuscript has been revised to provide a more thorough historical context and to more clearly position our work within the existing body of related literature.

- **Strengthened Methodological Justification**: We have expanded the manuscript to better substantiate the paper's primary claims and to provide a more robust justification for the specific assessment methods utilized in our analysis.

- **Improved Clarity of Methods and Results**: Significant improvements have been made to enhance the clarity regarding the selection of our research methods. Furthermore, the presentation and interpretation of the results have been refined for greater lucidity and impact.

Assigned Action Editor: ~Sheng_Li3

Submission Number: 6050