This paper presents a novel method for the secure management of digital images formulated within the mathematical theory of polynomial interpolation. As main innovative features, our approach is based on a hierarchical joint ownership of the image by a trusted layered authority and on a deterministic watermarking procedure, embedding a short meaningful or random signature into the image. Experimental results show that the inserted signature can almost always be fully recovered even in presence of a reasonable amount of image degradation due to image processing operators, such as filtering, geometric distortions and compression
