Digital image watermarking: its formal model, fundamental properties and possible attacks

While formal definitions and security proofs are well established in some fields like cryptography and steganography, they are not as evident in digital watermarking research. A systematic development of watermarking schemes is desirable, but at present their development is usually informal, ad hoc, and omits the complete realization of application scenarios. This practice not only hinders the choice and use of a suitable scheme for a watermarking application, but also leads to debate about the state-of-the-art for different watermarking applications. With a view to the systematic development of watermarking schemes, we present a formal generic model for digital image watermarking. Considering possible inputs, outputs, and component functions, the initial construction of a basic watermarking model is developed further to incorporate the use of keys. On the basis of our proposed model, fundamental watermarking properties are defined and their importance exemplified for different image applications. We also define a set of possible attacks using our model showing different winning scenarios depending on the adversary capabilities. It is envisaged that with a proper consideration of watermarking properties and adversary actions in different image applications, use of the proposed model would allow a unified treatment of all practically meaningful variants of watermarking schemes

Digital image watermarking: its formal model, fundamental properties and possible attacks

While formal definitions and security proofs are well established in some fields like cryptography and steganography, they are not as evident in digital watermarking research. A systematic development of watermarking schemes is desirable, but at present their development is usually informal, ad hoc, and omits the complete realization of application scenarios. This practice not only hinders the choice and use of a suitable scheme for a watermarking application, but also leads to debate about the state-of-the-art for different watermarking applications. With a view to the systematic development of watermarking schemes, we present a formal generic model for digital image watermarking. Considering possible inputs, outputs, and component functions, the initial construction of a basic watermarking model is developed further to incorporate the use of keys. On the basis of our proposed model, fundamental watermarking properties are defined and their importance exemplified for different image applications. We also define a set of possible attacks using our model showing different winning scenarios depending on the adversary capabilities. It is envisaged that with a proper consideration of watermarking properties and adversary actions in different image applications, use of the proposed model would allow a unified treatment of all practically meaningful variants of watermarking schemes

TRIDEnT: Building Decentralized Incentives for Collaborative Security

Sophisticated mass attacks, especially when exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities, have the potential to cause destructive damage to organizations and critical infrastructure. To timely detect and contain such attacks, collaboration among the defenders is critical. By correlating real-time detection information (alerts) from multiple sources (collaborative intrusion detection), defenders can detect attacks and take the appropriate defensive measures in time. However, although the technical tools to facilitate collaboration exist, real-world adoption of such collaborative security mechanisms is still underwhelming. This is largely due to a lack of trust and participation incentives for companies and organizations. This paper proposes TRIDEnT, a novel collaborative platform that aims to enable and incentivize parties to exchange network alert data, thus increasing their overall detection capabilities. TRIDEnT allows parties that may be in a competitive relationship, to selectively advertise, sell and acquire security alerts in the form of (near) real-time peer-to-peer streams. To validate the basic principles behind TRIDEnT, we present an intuitive game-theoretic model of alert sharing, that is of independent interest, and show that collaboration is bound to take place infinitely often. Furthermore, to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we instantiate our design in a decentralized manner using Ethereum smart contracts and provide a fully functional prototype.Comment: 28 page

A visible wavelet watermarking technique based on exploiting the contrast sensitivity function and noise reduction of human vision system

Dengan meluasnya penggunaan Internet dan pesatnya perkembangan teknologi digital, perlindungan hak cipta atas konten multimedia telah menjadi isu penting. Di antara teknologi yang tersedia, teknik watermarking digital dianggap sebagai solusi perlindungan hak milik atas sumber daya multimedia. Untuk mengevaluasi kinerja teknik watermarking yang terlihat, ketangguhan dan tembus persepsi adalah dua kriteria penting untuk aplikasi watermark. Untuk mendapatkan pertukaran terbaik antara energi penyisipan tanda air dan penembusan perseptual, penelitian ini menghadirkan teknik bernama ICOCOA (konten inovatif dan sadar kontras) dengan mengeksploitasi fungsi sensitivitas kontras (CSF) dan pengurangan kebisingan dari sistem penglihatan manusia. dalam domain wavelet. Ide baru lainnya dari karya ini adalah untuk mengusulkan kurva inovasi CSF masking (I-CSF) yang memberikan persepsi bobot yang lebih baik di mana arsitektur teori permainan dapat dimanfaatkan untuk menentukan masking I-CSF terbaik untuk gambar yang diberi watermark. Hasil percobaan menunjukkan bahwa pendekatan yang diusulkan tidak hanya memberikan kualitas watermark yang tembus cahaya tetapi juga mencapai ketahanan terhadap operasi pemrosesan gambar umum

Collusion-Deterrent Threshold Information Escrow

An information escrow (IE) service allows its users to encrypt a message such that the message is unlocked only when a user-specified condition is satisfied. Its instantiations include timed-release encryption and allegation escrows with applications ranging from e-auctions to the #metoo movement. The proposed IE systems typically employ threshold cryptography towards mitigating the single-point-of-failure problem. Here, a set of escrow agents securely realize the IE functionality as long as a threshold or more agents behave honestly. Nevertheless, these threshold information escrow (TIE) protocols are vulnerable to premature and undetectable unlocking of messages through collusion among rational agents offering the IE service. This work presents a provably secure TIE scheme in the mixed-behavior model consisting of rational and malicious escrow agents.; any collusion attempt among the agents towards premature decryption results in penalization through a loss of (crypto-)currency and getting banned from the system. The proposed collusion-deterrent escrow (CDE) scheme introduces a novel incentive-penalty mechanism among the agents to stay honest until the user-specified decryption condition is met. In particular, each agent makes a cryptocurrency deposit before the start of the protocol instance such that the deposit amount is returned to the agent when the user-specified condition is met or can be transferred by anyone who holds a secret key corresponding to a public key associated with the instance. Using a novel combination of oblivious transfer, robust bit watermarking, and secure multi-party computation, CDE ensures that whenever the agents collude to decrypt the user data prematurely, one or more whistle-blower agents can withdraw/transfer the deposits of all other agents, thereby penalizing them. We model collusion as a game induced among rational agents offering the CDE service and show that the agents do not collude at equilibrium in game-theoretic terms. We also present a prototype implementation of the CDE protocol and demonstrate its efficiency towards use in practice. While this work does not aim to solve the collusion problem fully, it significantly raises the bar for collusion. It offers an important step towards weakening the strong non-collusion assumption pervasive across multi-party computation applications

Bibliographical review on cyber attacks from a control oriented perspective

This paper presents a bibliographical review of definitions, classifications and applications concerning cyber attacks in networked control systems (NCSs) and cyber-physical systems (CPSs). This review tackles the topic from a control-oriented perspective, which is complementary to information or communication ones. After motivating the importance of developing new methods for attack detection and secure control, this review presents security objectives, attack modeling, and a characterization of considered attacks and threats presenting the detection mechanisms and remedial actions. In order to show the properties of each attack, as well as to provide some deeper insight into possible defense mechanisms, examples available in the literature are discussed. Finally, open research issues and paths are presented.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Data Hiding in Digital Video

With the rapid development of digital multimedia technologies, an old method which is called steganography has been sought to be a solution for data hiding applications such as digital watermarking and covert communication. Steganography is the art of secret communication using a cover signal, e.g., video, audio, image etc., whereas the counter-technique, detecting the existence of such as a channel through a statistically trained classifier, is called steganalysis. The state-of-the art data hiding algorithms utilize features; such as Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients, pixel values, motion vectors etc., of the cover signal to convey the message to the receiver side. The goal of embedding algorithm is to maximize the number of bits sent to the decoder side (embedding capacity) with maximum robustness against attacks while keeping the perceptual and statistical distortions (security) low. Data Hiding schemes are characterized by these three conflicting requirements: security against steganalysis, robustness against channel associated and/or intentional distortions, and the capacity in terms of the embedded payload. Depending upon the application it is the designer\u27s task to find an optimum solution amongst them. The goal of this thesis is to develop a novel data hiding scheme to establish a covert channel satisfying statistical and perceptual invisibility with moderate rate capacity and robustness to combat steganalysis based detection. The idea behind the proposed method is the alteration of Video Object (VO) trajectory coordinates to convey the message to the receiver side by perturbing the centroid coordinates of the VO. Firstly, the VO is selected by the user and tracked through the frames by using a simple region based search strategy and morphological operations. After the trajectory coordinates are obtained, the perturbation of the coordinates implemented through the usage of a non-linear embedding function, such as a polar quantizer where both the magnitude and phase of the motion is used. However, the perturbations made to the motion magnitude and phase were kept small to preserve the semantic meaning of the object motion trajectory. The proposed method is well suited to the video sequences in which VOs have smooth motion trajectories. Examples of these types could be found in sports videos in which the ball is the focus of attention and exhibits various motion types, e.g., rolling on the ground, flying in the air, being possessed by a player, etc. Different sports video sequences have been tested by using the proposed method. Through the experimental results, it is shown that the proposed method achieved the goal of both statistical and perceptual invisibility with moderate rate embedding capacity under AWGN channel with varying noise variances. This achievement is important as the first step for both active and passive steganalysis is the detection of the existence of covert channel. This work has multiple contributions in the field of data hiding. Firstly, it is the first example of a data hiding method in which the trajectory of a VO is used. Secondly, this work has contributed towards improving steganographic security by providing new features: the coordinate location and semantic meaning of the object