An Efficient and Fair Buyer-Seller Fingerprinting Scheme for Large Scale Networks

[[abstract]]In digital watermarking, most existing schemes focus on the owners' copyright protection rather than protection of the customers' rights. Therefore, these schemes are unfair to legitimate customers who have no certificate to prove their right to use the watermarked digital content that they have purchased. In addition, these schemes are also unable to identify those who leak pirated copies of the watermarked digital content. To protect customers' rights and to identify the users of unauthorized copies, the fingerprinting technique is a feasible method for embedding a watermark so that content owners can identify users who have purchased the right to use the content and users who have not purchased this right. Although some fingerprinting schemes have been proposed in recent years, most of them are inefficient due to their homomorphic architecture that is based on public key cryptography. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a fair, traceable, and efficient watermarking scheme with a novel architecture. Due to the high computational complexity of the asymmetric cryptography, such as modular multiplications and exponentiations which lead much heavier burden than operations in symmetric cryptography, the proposed protocol transfers the demanding computational requirements from the buyer to a powerful server in protocol design. The proposed method can achieve these benefits: 1) the rights of legitimate buyers can be protected; 2) the proposed scheme is traceable; 3) the proposed scheme is more efficient than the previous schemes because public key cryptography is not frequently used; and 4) the buyer's anonymity can be well-protected until there is an infringement accusation

Improved Hybrid Fingerprint-Based P2P Media Distribution For Privacy Protection

It has been suggested that anonymous fingerprinting could be an easy way to ensure the lawful dissemination of copyright-protected multimedia content without compromising the privacy of customers, whose names would only be revealed in the event of illegal re-distribution of the content. This idea has been put forward as a potential solution to the problem. However, the majority of the currently available anonymous fingerprinting systems are not practical. This is due to the fact that they make use of complicated protocols that take up a lot of time, as well as homomorphic encryption of the data. Furthermore, they distribute the data using a unicast approach, which does not scale well for a large number of clients. The concept of recombined fingerprints serves as the foundation for this body of work, which also makes an effort to overcome some of these restrictions. On the other hand, recommended fingerprint approaches need a complex graph search for traitor monitoring, which in turn demands the participation of additional buyers and honest proxies in their P2P distribution scenario. Getting rid of these issues and developing a fingerprinting system that is not only efficient but also scalable, private, and makes use of P2P technology is the purpose of this research

Approximation-based homomorphic encryption for secure and efficient blockchain-driven watermarking service

Homomorphic encryption has been widely used to preserve the privacy of watermarking process on blockchain-driven watermarking services. It offers transparent and traceable encrypted watermarking without revealing sensitive data such as original images or watermark data to the public. Nevertheless, the existing works suffer from enormous memory storage and extensive computing power. This study proposed an approximation-based homomorphic encryption for resource-efficient encrypted watermarking without sacrificing watermarking quality. We demonstrated the efficiency of the Cheon-Kim-Kim-Son (CKKS) encrypted watermarking process using discrete cosine transform-singular value decomposition (DCT-SVD) embedding. The evaluation results showed that it could preserve the watermarking quality similar to non-encrypted watermark embedding, even after geometrical and filtering attacks. Compared to existing homomorphic encryption, such as Brakerski-Gentry-Vaikuntanathan (BFV) encryption, it has superior performance regarding resource utilization and watermarking quality preservation

Digital Copyright Protection: Focus on Some Relevant Solutions

Copyright protection of digital content is considered a relevant problem of the current Internet since content digitalization and high performance interconnection networks have greatly increased the possibilities to reproduce and distribute digital content. Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems try to prevent the inappropriate or illegal use of copyrighted digital content. They are promoted by the major global media players, but they are also perceived as proprietary solutions that give rise to classic problems of privacy and fair use. On the other hand, watermarking protocols have become a possible solution to the problem of copyright protection. They have evolved during the last decade, and interesting proposals have been designed. This paper first presents current trends concerning the most significant solutions to the problem of copyright protection based on DRM systems and then focuses on the most promising approaches in the field of watermarking protocols. In this regard, the examined protocols are discussed in order to individuate which of them can better represent the right trade-off between opposite goals, such as, for example, security and easy of use, so as to prove that it is possible to implement open solutions compatible with the current web context without resorting to proprietary architectures or impairing the protection of copyrighted digital content