A security consultant is investigating acts of corporate espionage within an organization. Each time the organization releases confidential information to high-ranking engineers, the information is…

By embedding a unique digital watermark into each copy of a confidential document before distribution, the security consultant can later extract the watermark from the leaked version to identify exactly which engineer received that specific copy. This provides non-repudiation evidence and pinpoints the source of the leak without alerting suspects in advance.

Steganography hides secret data inside a carrier file to conceal a message, but it does not provide a mechanism to track or identify the source of a document leak.

Enforcing NDAs is a legal deterrent and remediation tool after a leak is confirmed, but it does not provide a technical means of identifying which individual was the source.

Digital Rights Management controls access to and usage of content but does not embed per-recipient identifiers that would allow attribution of a leaked copy to a specific individual.