Transparent encryption with scalable video communication: Lower-latency, CABAC-based schemes

Selective encryption masks all of the content without completely hiding it, as full encryption would do at a cost in encryption delay and increased bandwidth. Many commercial applications of video encryption do not even require selective encryption, because greater utility can be gained from transparent encryption, i.e. allowing prospective viewers to glimpse a reduced quality version of the content as a taster. Our lightweight selective encryption scheme when applied to scalable video coding is well suited to transparent encryption. The paper illustrates the gains in reducing delay and increased distortion arising from a transparent encryption that leaves reduced quality base layer in the clear. Reduced encryption of B-frames is a further step beyond transparent encryption in which the computational overhead reduction is traded against content security and limited distortion. This spectrum of video encryption possibilities is analyzed in this paper, though all of the schemes maintain decoder compatibility and add no bitrate overhead as a result of jointly encoding and encrypting the input video by virtue of carefully selecting the entropy coding parameters that are encrypted. The schemes are suitable both for H.264 and HEVC codecs, though demonstrated in the paper for H.264. Selected Content Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (CABAC) parameters are encrypted by a lightweight Exclusive OR technique, which is chosen for practicality

Selective encryption in the CCSDS standard for lossless and near-lossless multispectral and hyperspectral image compression

In this paper, we investigate low-complexity encryption solutions to be embedded in the recently proposed CCSDS standard for lossless and near-lossless multispectral and hyperspectral image compression. The proposed approach is based on the randomization of selected components in the image compression pipeline, namely the sign of prediction residual and the fixed part of Rice-Golomb codes, inspired by similar solutions adopted in video coding. Thanks to the adaptive nature of the CCSDS algorithm, even simple randomization of the sign of prediction residuals can provide a sufficient scrambling of the decoded image when the encryption key is not available. Results on the standard CCSDS test set show that the proposed technique uses on average only about 20% of the keystream compared to a conventional stream cipher, with a negligible increase of the rate of the encoder

SLEPX: An Efficient Lightweight Cipher for Visual Protection of Scalable HEVC Extension

This paper proposes a lightweight cipher scheme aimed at the scalable extension of the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) codec, referred to as the Scalable HEVC (SHVC) standard. This stream cipher, Symmetric Cipher for Lightweight Encryption based on Permutation and EXlusive OR (SLEPX), applies Selective Encryption (SE) over suitable coding syntax elements in the SHVC layers. This is achieved minimal computational complexity and delay. The algorithm also conserves most SHVC functionalities, i.e. preservation of bit-length, decoder format-compliance, and error resilience. For comparative analysis, results were taken and compared with other state-of-art ciphers i.e. Exclusive-OR (XOR) and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). The performance of SLEPX is also compared with existing video SE solutions to confirm the efficiency of the adopted scheme. The experimental results demonstrate that SLEPX is as secure as AES in terms of visual protection, while computationally efficient comparable with a basic XOR cipher. Visual quality assessment, security analysis and extensive cryptanalysis (based on numerical values of selected binstrings) also showed the effectiveness of SLEPX’s visual protection scheme for SHVC compared to previously-employed cryptographic technique

QUALITY-DRIVEN CROSS LAYER DESIGN FOR MULTIMEDIA SECURITY OVER RESOURCE CONSTRAINED WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

The strong need for security guarantee, e.g., integrity and authenticity, as well as privacy and confidentiality in wireless multimedia services has driven the development of an emerging research area in low cost Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs). Unfortunately, those conventional encryption and authentication techniques cannot be applied directly to WMSNs due to inborn challenges such as extremely limited energy, computing and bandwidth resources. This dissertation provides a quality-driven security design and resource allocation framework for WMSNs. The contribution of this dissertation bridges the inter-disciplinary research gap between high layer multimedia signal processing and low layer computer networking. It formulates the generic problem of quality-driven multimedia resource allocation in WMSNs and proposes a cross layer solution. The fundamental methodologies of multimedia selective encryption and stream authentication, and their application to digital image or video compression standards are presented. New multimedia selective encryption and stream authentication schemes are proposed at application layer, which significantly reduces encryption/authentication complexity. In addition, network resource allocation methodologies at low layers are extensively studied. An unequal error protection-based network resource allocation scheme is proposed to achieve the best effort media quality with integrity and energy efficiency guarantee. Performance evaluation results show that this cross layer framework achieves considerable energy-quality-security gain by jointly designing multimedia selective encryption/multimedia stream authentication and communication resource allocation

Puzzle -A Novel Video Encryption Algorithm

Abstract. Networked multimedia applications have matured in recent years to be deployed in a larger scale in the Internet. Confidentiality is one of the primary concerns of these services for their commercial usages, e.g. in video on demand services or in video conferences. In particular, video encryption algorithms are strongly required that fulfill real-time requirements. In this paper we present the video encryption algorithm Puzzle to encrypting video streams in software. It is fast enough to fulfill real-time constraints and to provide a sufficient security. Puzzle is a video compression independent algorithm which can be easily incorporated into existing multimedia systems

A NOVEL JOINT PERCEPTUAL ENCRYPTION AND WATERMARKING SCHEME (JPEW) WITHIN JPEG FRAMEWORK

Due to the rapid growth in internet and multimedia technologies, many new commercial applications like video on demand (VOD), pay-per-view and real-time multimedia broadcast etc, have emerged. To ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the multimedia content, the content is usually watermarked and then encrypted or vice versa. If the multimedia content needs to be watermarked and encrypted at the same time, the watermarking function needs to be performed first followed by encryption function. Hence, if the watermark needs to be extracted then the multimedia data needs to be decrypted first followed by extraction of the watermark. This results in large computational overhead. The solution provided in the literature for this problem is by using what is called partial encryption, in which media data are partitioned into two parts - one to be watermarked and the other is encrypted. In addition, some multimedia applications i.e. video on demand (VOD), Pay-TV, pay-per-view etc, allow multimedia content preview which involves „perceptual‟ encryption wherein all or some selected part of the content is, perceptually speaking, distorted with an encryption key. Up till now no joint perceptual encryption and watermarking scheme has been proposed in the literature. In this thesis, a novel Joint Perceptual Encryption and Watermarking (JPEW) scheme is proposed that is integrated within JPEG standard. The design of JPEW involves the design and development of both perceptual encryption and watermarking schemes that are integrated in JPEG and feasible within the „partial‟ encryption framework. The perceptual encryption scheme exploits the energy distribution of AC components and DC components bitplanes of continuous-tone images and is carried out by selectively encrypting these AC coefficients and DC components bitplanes. The encryption itself is based on a chaos-based permutation reported in an earlier work. Similarly, in contrast to the traditional watermarking schemes, the proposed watermarking scheme makes use of DC component of the image and it is carried out by selectively substituting certain bitplanes of DC components with watermark bits. vi ii Apart from the aforesaid JPEW, additional perceptual encryption scheme, integrated in JPEG, has also been proposed. The scheme is outside of joint framework and implements perceptual encryption on region of interest (ROI) by scrambling the DCT blocks of the chosen ROI. The performances of both, perceptual encryption and watermarking schemes are evaluated and compared with Quantization Index modulation (QIM) based watermarking scheme and reversible Histogram Spreading (RHS) based perceptual encryption scheme. The results show that the proposed watermarking scheme is imperceptible and robust, and suitable for authentication. Similarly, the proposed perceptual encryption scheme outperforms the RHS based scheme in terms of number of operations required to achieve a given level of perceptual encryption and provides control over the amount of perceptual encryption. The overall security of the JPEW has also been evaluated. Additionally, the performance of proposed separate perceptual encryption scheme has been thoroughly evaluated in terms of security and compression efficiency. The scheme is found to be simpler in implementation, have insignificant effect on compression ratios and provide more options for the selection of control factor

Efficient simultaneous encryption and compression of digital videos in computationally constrained applications

This thesis is concerned with the secure video transmission over open and wireless network channels. This would facilitate adequate interaction in computationally constrained applications among trusted entities such as in disaster/conflict zones, secure airborne transmission of videos for intelligence/security or surveillance purposes, and secure video communication for law enforcing agencies in crime fighting or in proactive forensics. Video content is generally too large and vulnerable to eavesdropping when transmitted over open network channels so that compression and encryption become very essential for storage and/or transmission. In terms of security, wireless channels, are more vulnerable than other kinds of mediums to a variety of attacks and eavesdropping. Since wireless communication is the main mode in the above applications, protecting video transmissions from unauthorized access through such network channels is a must. The main and multi-faceted challenges that one faces in implementing such a task are related to competing, and to some extent conflicting, requirements of a number of standard control factors relating to the constrained bandwidth, reasonably high image quality at the receiving end, the execution time, and robustness against security attacks. Applying both compression and encryption techniques simultaneously is a very tough challenge due to the fact that we need to optimize the compression ratio, time complexity, security and the quality simultaneously. There are different available image/video compression schemes that provide reasonable compression while attempting to maintain image quality, such as JPEG, MPEG and JPEG2000. The main approach to video compression is based on detecting and removing spatial correlation within the video frames as well as temporal correlations across the video frames. Temporal correlations are expected to be more evident across sequences of frames captured within a short period of time (often a fraction of a second). Correlation can be measured in terms of similarity between blocks of pixels. Frequency domain transforms such as the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) have both been used restructure the frequency content (coefficients) to become amenable for efficient detection. JPEG and MPEG use DCT while JPEG2000 uses DWT. Removing spatial/temporal correlation encodes only one block from each class of equivalent (i.e. similar) blocks and remembering the position of all other block within the equivalence class. JPEG2000 compressed images achieve higher image quality than JPEG for the same compression ratios, while DCT based coding suffer from noticeable distortion at high compression ratio but when applied to any block it is easy to isolate the significant coefficients from the non-significant ones. Efficient video encryption in computationally constrained applications is another challenge on its own. It has long been recognised that selective encryption is the only viable approach to deal with the overwhelming file size. Selection can be made in the spatial or frequency domain. Efficiency of simultaneous compression and encryption is a good reason for us to apply selective encryption in the frequency domain. In this thesis we develop a hybrid of DWT and DCT for improved image/video compression in terms of image quality, compression ratio, bandwidth, and efficiency. We shall also investigate other techniques that have similar properties to the DCT in terms of representation of significant wavelet coefficients. The statistical properties of wavelet transform high frequency sub-bands provide one such approach, and we also propose phase sensing as another alternative but very efficient scheme. Simultaneous compression and encryption, in our investigations, were aimed at finding the best way of applying these two tasks in parallel by selecting some wavelet sub-bands for encryptions and applying compression on the other sub-bands. Since most spatial/temporal correlation appear in the high frequency wavelet sub-bands and the LL sub-bands of wavelet transformed images approximate the original images then we select the LL-sub-band data for encryption and the non-LL high frequency sub-band coefficients for compression. We also follow the common practice of using stream ciphers to meet efficiency requirements of real-time transmission. For key stream generation we investigated a number of schemes and the ultimate choice will depend on robustness to attacks. The still image (i.e. RF’s) are compressed with a modified EZW wavelet scheme by applying the DCT on the blocks of the wavelet sub-bands, selecting appropriate thresholds for determining significance of coefficients, and encrypting the EZW thresholds only with a simple 10-bit LFSR cipher This scheme is reasonably efficient in terms of processing time, compression ratio, image quality, as well was security robustness against statistical and frequency attack. However, many areas for improvements were identified as necessary to achieve the objectives of the thesis. Through a process of refinement we developed and tested 3 different secure efficient video compression schemes, whereby at each step we improve the performance of the scheme in the previous step. Extensive experiments are conducted to test performance of the new scheme, at each refined stage, in terms of efficiency, compression ratio, image quality, and security robustness. Depending on the aspects of compression that needs improvement at each refinement step, we replaced the previous block coding scheme with a more appropriate one from among the 3 above mentioned schemes (i.e. DCT, Edge sensing and phase sensing) for the reference frames or the non-reference ones. In subsequent refinement steps we apply encryption to a slightly expanded LL-sub-band using successively more secure stream ciphers, but with different approaches to key stream generation. In the first refinement step, encryption utilized two LFSRs seeded with three secret keys to scramble the significant wavelet LL-coefficients multiple times. In the second approach, the encryption algorithm utilises LFSR to scramble the wavelet coefficients of the edges extracted from the low frequency sub-band. These edges are mapped from the high frequency sub-bands using different threshold. Finally, use a version of the A5 cipher combined with chaotic logistic map to encrypt the significant parameters of the LL sub-band. Our empirical results show that the refinement process achieves the ultimate objectives of the thesis, i.e. efficient secure video compression scheme that is scalable in terms of the frame size at about 100 fps and satisfying the following features; high compression, reasonable quality, and resistance to the statistical, frequency and the brute force attack with low computational processing. Although image quality fluctuates depending on video complexity, in the conclusion we recommend an adaptive implementation of our scheme. Although this thesis does not deal with transmission tasks but the efficiency achieved in terms of video encryption and compression time as well as in compression ratios will be sufficient for real-time secure transmission of video using commercially available mobile computing devices