Updated on 2025-08-12 GMT+08:00

Performing Watermark Tracing

If data assets with data watermarks or dot matrix watermarks enabled are leaked without authorization, you can utilize the watermark tracing function to identify the personnel involved in the data leak.

Prerequisites

Before tracing watermarks, ensure you have acquired the leaked data containing watermarks, documents with invisible watermarks, or dot matrix watermarks. For details about how to enable watermark protection for data assets, see Adding a Watermark Rule.

Procedure

  1. Log in to the web console of the API data security protection system as user sysadmin.
  2. In the navigation tree on the left, choose Security Policies > Watermarks, and click the Trace management tab.
  3. To trace Data Watermarks, perform the following steps:

    1. On the Trace management page, click the Data watermark tab.
    2. To directly trace the leaked data, copy the trace content to the dialog box on the watermark tracing page and click Trace.
      Figure 1 Copying the trace content
      Figure 2 Pasting the trace content to the tracing dialog box

      Data watermarks are highly transparent and covert. When you configure a data watermark, the trace content copied into the dialog box will carry a trace ID. However, this ID remains invisible within the dialog box.

  4. To trace an implicit file watermark, perform the following steps:

    1. On the Trace management page, select Implicit file watermark.
    2. Click .
    3. On the import page, click Click or drag files here to upload, upload a file with invisible watermarks from the local PC, and click Trace.

  5. To trace a dot matrix watermark, perform the following steps:

    1. On the Trace management page, click the Dot matrix watermark tab.
    2. Based on the obtained dot matrix watermark shape, sequentially select dot matrices in the vector encoding comparison table from left to right and top to bottom.

      Among the nine dot matrices of the dot matrix watermark, the first dot matrix serves as the start character, while the remaining eight dot matrices correspond to different pieces of information. After the operation is complete, a string of eight characters is generated in the text box.

    3. Click Trace.

  6. On the Traceability result page, view tracing information.

    Figure 3 Trace result

  7. (Optional) On the Traceability result page, click Details to view details about the trace result.