TableMark: A Multi-bit Watermark for Synthetic Tabular Data

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 14 Mar 2026] TableMark: A Multi-bit Watermark for Synthetic Tabular Data Yuyang Xia, Yaoqiang Xu, Chen Qian, Yang Li, Guoliang Li, Jianhua Feng Watermarking has emerged as an effective solution for copyright protection of synthetic data. However, applying watermarking techniques to synthetic tabular data presents challenges, as tabular data can easily lose their watermarks through shuffling or deletion operations. The major challenge is to provide traceability for tracking multiple users of the watermarked tabular data while maintaining high data utility and robustness (resistance to attacks). To address this, we design a multi-bit watermarking scheme TableMark that encodes watermarks into synthetic tabular data, ensuring superior traceability and robustness while maintaining high utility. We formulate the watermark encoding process as a constrained optimization problem, allowing the data owner to effectively trade off robustness and utility. Additionally, we propose effective optimization mechanisms to solve this problem to enhance the data utility. Experimental results on four widely used real-world datasets show that TableMark effectively traces a large number of users, is resilient to attacks, and preserves high utility. Moreover, TableMark significantly outperforms state-of-the-art tabular watermarking schemes. Comments: 23 pages Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Databases (cs.DB) Cite as: arXiv:2603.13722 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.13722v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.13722 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Yuyang Xia [view email] [v1] Sat, 14 Mar 2026 03:01:00 UTC (4,834 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.DB References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)