arXiv AI By Jidong Yang, Qi Li, Wei Zong, Yang-Wai Chow, Willy Susilo, Huaike Yu, Chunpeng Wang, Suo Gao

One Prompt Is Enough: Watermark Laundering Through Foundation Image Models

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The paper introduces the concept of watermark laundering, where an attacker uses a single reconstruction prompt on public foundation image models to produce a visually faithful output that renders invisible watermarks undecodable. The authors evaluate this failure mode across six OpenAI and Google image editing models, three watermarking schemes, and 1,800 reconstructions, finding that OpenAI models cause the strongest payload disruption while Nano Banana 2 shows vulnerability of DwtDct under high-fidelity reconstruction. Prompt ablation experiments reveal that the disruption is driven by the reconstruction pathway itself rather than any specific removal instruction, highlighting prompt-conditioned reconstruction as a distinct attack interface.

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