Digital Watermarking for Verification of Perception-based Integrity of Audio Data

In certain application fields digital audio recordings contain sensitive content. Examples are historical archival material in public archives that preserve our cultural heritage, or digital evidence in the context of law enforcement and civil proceedings. Because of the powerful capabilities of modern editing tools for multimedia such material is vulnerable to doctoring of the content and forgery of its origin with malicious intent. Also inadvertent data modification and mistaken origin can be caused by human error. Hence, the credibility and provenience in terms of an unadulterated and genuine state of such audio content and the confidence about its origin are critical factors. To address this issue, this PhD thesis proposes a mechanism for verifying the integrity and authenticity of digital sound recordings. It is designed and implemented to be insensitive to common post-processing operations of the audio data that influence the subjective acoustic perception only marginally (if at all). Examples of such operations include lossy compression that maintains a high sound quality of the audio media, or lossless format conversions. It is the objective to avoid de facto false alarms that would be expectedly observable in standard crypto-based authentication protocols in the presence of these legitimate post-processing. For achieving this, a feasible combination of the techniques of digital watermarking and audio-specific hashing is investigated. At first, a suitable secret-key dependent audio hashing algorithm is developed. It incorporates and enhances so-called audio fingerprinting technology from the state of the art in contentbased audio identification. The presented algorithm (denoted as ”rMAC” message authentication code) allows ”perception-based” verification of integrity. This means classifying integrity breaches as such not before they become audible. As another objective, this rMAC is embedded and stored silently inside the audio media by means of audio watermarking technology. This approach allows maintaining the authentication code across the above-mentioned admissible post-processing operations and making it available for integrity verification at a later date. For this, an existent secret-key ependent audio watermarking algorithm is used and enhanced in this thesis work. To some extent, the dependency of the rMAC and of the watermarking processing from a secret key also allows authenticating the origin of a protected audio. To elaborate on this security aspect, this work also estimates the brute-force efforts of an adversary attacking this combined rMAC-watermarking approach. The experimental results show that the proposed method provides a good distinction and classification performance of authentic versus doctored audio content. It also allows the temporal localization of audible data modification within a protected audio file. The experimental evaluation finally provides recommendations about technical configuration settings of the combined watermarking-hashing approach. Beyond the main topic of perception-based data integrity and data authenticity for audio, this PhD work provides new general findings in the fields of audio fingerprinting and digital watermarking. The main contributions of this PhD were published and presented mainly at conferences about multimedia security. These publications were cited by a number of other authors and hence had some impact on their works

Robust Watermarking Using FFT and Cordic QR Techniques

Digital media sharing and access in today’s world of the internet is very frequent for every user. The management of digital rights may come into threat easily as the accessibility of data through the internet become wide. Sharing digital information under security procedures can be easily compromised due to the various vulnerabilities floating over the internet. Existing research has been tied to protecting internet channels to ensure the safety of digital data. Researchers have investigated various encryption techniques to prevent digital rights management but certain challenges including external potential attacks cannot be avoided that may give unauthorized access to digital media. The proposed model endorsed the concept of watermarking in digital data to uplift media security and ensure digital rights management. The system provides an efficient procedure to conduct over-watermarking in digital audio signals and confirm the avoidance of ownership of the host data. The proposed technique uses a watermark picture as a signature that has been initially encrypted with Arnold's cat map and cyclic encoding before being embedded. The upper triangular R-matrix component of the energy band was then created by using the Fast Fourier transform and Cordic QR procedures to the host audio stream. Using PN random sequences, the encrypted watermarking image has been embedded in the host audio component of the R-matrix. The same procedure has been applied to extract the watermark image from the watermarked audio. The proposed model evaluates the quality of the watermarked audio and extracted watermark image. The average PSNR of the watermarked audio is found to be 37.01 dB. It has also been seen that the average PSNR, Normal cross-correlation, BER, SSMI (structure similarity index matric) value for the extracted watermark image is found to be 96.30 dB, 0.9042 units, 0.1033 units, and 0.9836 units respectively. Further, the model has been tested using various attacks to check its robustness. After applying attacks such as noising, filtering, cropping, and resampling on the watermarked audio, the watermark image has been extricated and its quality has been checked under the standard parameters. It has been found that the quality of the recovered watermark image satisfying enough to justify the digital ownership of the host audio. Hence, the proposed watermarking model attains a perfect balance between imperceptibility, payload, and robustness

Protection of Relational Databases by Means of Watermarking: Recent Advances and Challenges

Databases represent today great economical and strategic concerns for both enterprises and public institutions. In that context, where data leaks, robbery as well as innocent or even hostile data degradation represent a real danger, and watermarking appears as an interesting tool. Watermarking is based on the imperceptible embedding of a message or watermark into a database in order, for instance, to determine its origin as well as to detect if it has been modified. A major advantage of watermarking in relation to other digital content protection mechanisms is that it leaves access to the data while keeping them protected by means of a watermark, independent of the data format storage. Nevertheless, it is necessary to ensure that the introduced distortion does not perturb the exploitation of the database. In this chapter, we give a general overview of the latest database watermarking methods, focusing on those dealing with distortion control. In particular, we present a recent technique based on an ontological modeling of the database semantics that represent the relationships in between attributes—relationships that should be preserved in order to avoid the appearance of incoherent and unlikely records

Data Hiding and Its Applications

Data hiding techniques have been widely used to provide copyright protection, data integrity, covert communication, non-repudiation, and authentication, among other applications. In the context of the increased dissemination and distribution of multimedia content over the internet, data hiding methods, such as digital watermarking and steganography, are becoming increasingly relevant in providing multimedia security. The goal of this book is to focus on the improvement of data hiding algorithms and their different applications (both traditional and emerging), bringing together researchers and practitioners from different research fields, including data hiding, signal processing, cryptography, and information theory, among others

Fragile watermarking scheme based on SHA-256 hash function and mersenne twister for medical image authentication

Medical images can be easily manipulated by irresponsible persons and the altered medical image can be hard to identify. Fragile watermarking scheme is an alternative solution to authenticate and protect the medical images. Fragile watermarking scheme becomes vulnerable against modification by attackers. This research proposed a fragile watermarking scheme for medical images based onSHA-256 and Mersenne twister. A medical image was split into a region of interest (ROI) and region of non-interest (RONI). The ROI as watermarked image is encrypted by SHA-256 and the result is scrambled by Arnold transform with a secret key before embedding the watermark. The scrambled hash values are randomly embedded into RONI by using Mersenne Twister with a secret key. The experimental results showed that our scheme produces high imperceptibility with PSNR value of about 83 dB. The proposed scheme was able to detect tampers accurately on the medical images. The proposed scheme improved the invisibility of the watermarked image and it provided additional security. The proposed scheme authenticated and validated the originality of the medical images

A Systematic Algorithm for Denoising Audio Signal Using Savitzky - Golay Method

Audio signal noise reduction is a great task to acquiring noiseless sounds in the noisy environment. But, naturally the audio signals are naturally very noise, which is produced from analog or digital recorders. In this research paper, an efficient noiseless audio reduction system using Savitzky-Golay method is proposed for eliminating unwanted echoes, ripples, etc. Three different audio signals are taken for this work. First one is a human voice in the mobile conversation, which is used for telecommunication purpose. Second is one vehicle sound for usages in security applications. The last one is a music instrumental sound, which used in recording lab. Finally, the proposed system will be compared with the existing noise filters and proved their efficiency with high accuracy, high signal to noise ratio and low elapsed time

Detección de manipulaciones en evidencia digital con fines forenses

En términos de evidencia digital, la imagen de la escena de un crimen es un elemento importante en un proceso legal; razón por la cual es indispensable que se garantice su cadena de custodia. Si la imagen es modificada con operaciones como eliminación, duplicidad o difuminado de objetos, debe existir un mecanismo que identifique la existencia de dicha manipulación. En este proyecto, se propone una solución a la cadena de custodia basada en una técnica conocida como marcado de agua. Con el propósito de validar la sensibilidad y efectividad del sistema propuesto, se aplican seis clases de manipulaciones a imágenes marcadas; encontrando una alta sensibilidad a manipulaciones pequeñas (ej. 0.25% del tamaño de la imagen), dado que en todos los casos fue identificada la manipulación. Con la solución propuesta, la autoridad legal puede confiar en la cadena de custodia de la evidencia digital.