Lime: Data Lineage in the Malicious Environment

Intentional or unintentional leakage of confidential data is undoubtedly one of the most severe security threats that organizations face in the digital era. The threat now extends to our personal lives: a plethora of personal information is available to social networks and smartphone providers and is indirectly transferred to untrustworthy third party and fourth party applications. In this work, we present a generic data lineage framework LIME for data flow across multiple entities that take two characteristic, principal roles (i.e., owner and consumer). We define the exact security guarantees required by such a data lineage mechanism toward identification of a guilty entity, and identify the simplifying non repudiation and honesty assumptions. We then develop and analyze a novel accountable data transfer protocol between two entities within a malicious environment by building upon oblivious transfer, robust watermarking, and signature primitives. Finally, we perform an experimental evaluation to demonstrate the practicality of our protocol

Spread spectrum-based video watermarking algorithms for copyright protection

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/2263 on 14.03.2017 by CS (TIS)Digital technologies know an unprecedented expansion in the last years. The consumer can now benefit from hardware and software which was considered state-of-the-art several years ago. The advantages offered by the digital technologies are major but the same digital technology opens the door for unlimited piracy. Copying an analogue VCR tape was certainly possible and relatively easy, in spite of various forms of protection, but due to the analogue environment, the subsequent copies had an inherent loss in quality. This was a natural way of limiting the multiple copying of a video material. With digital technology, this barrier disappears, being possible to make as many copies as desired, without any loss in quality whatsoever. Digital watermarking is one of the best available tools for fighting this threat. The aim of the present work was to develop a digital watermarking system compliant with the recommendations drawn by the EBU, for video broadcast monitoring. Since the watermark can be inserted in either spatial domain or transform domain, this aspect was investigated and led to the conclusion that wavelet transform is one of the best solutions available. Since watermarking is not an easy task, especially considering the robustness under various attacks several techniques were employed in order to increase the capacity/robustness of the system: spread-spectrum and modulation techniques to cast the watermark, powerful error correction to protect the mark, human visual models to insert a robust mark and to ensure its invisibility. The combination of these methods led to a major improvement, but yet the system wasn't robust to several important geometrical attacks. In order to achieve this last milestone, the system uses two distinct watermarks: a spatial domain reference watermark and the main watermark embedded in the wavelet domain. By using this reference watermark and techniques specific to image registration, the system is able to determine the parameters of the attack and revert it. Once the attack was reverted, the main watermark is recovered. The final result is a high capacity, blind DWr-based video watermarking system, robust to a wide range of attacks.BBC Research & Developmen

Watermarking protocol of secure verification

The secure verification is important for watermarking protocols. A malicious arbitrator is able to remove an original watermark from an unauthorized copy of the digital content as a result of a security breach in the phase of arbitration and resell multiple copies of it with impunity. We propose a novel buyer-seller watermarking protocol of secure verification. In this scheme, a seller permutes an original watermark provided by a trusted Watermarking Certification Authority (WCA) and embeds it into digital content in an encrypted domain. In case an unauthorized copy is found, the seller can recover the original watermark from the watermark extracted from the copy and sends it to an arbitrator. Without the knowledge of permutations applied by the seller, the arbitrator is unable to remove the permuted watermark from the digital content. Hence, verification is secured. As an additional advantage of the proposed protocol, arbitration can be conducted without the need for the cooperation of the WCA or the buyer

High capacity data embedding schemes for digital media

High capacity image data hiding methods and robust high capacity digital audio watermarking algorithms are studied in this thesis. The main results of this work are the development of novel algorithms with state-of-the-art performance, high capacity and transparency for image data hiding and robustness, high capacity and low distortion for audio watermarking.En esta tesis se estudian y proponen diversos métodos de data hiding de imágenes y watermarking de audio de alta capacidad. Los principales resultados de este trabajo consisten en la publicación de varios algoritmos novedosos con rendimiento a la altura de los mejores métodos del estado del arte, alta capacidad y transparencia, en el caso de data hiding de imágenes, y robustez, alta capacidad y baja distorsión para el watermarking de audio.En aquesta tesi s'estudien i es proposen diversos mètodes de data hiding d'imatges i watermarking d'àudio d'alta capacitat. Els resultats principals d'aquest treball consisteixen en la publicació de diversos algorismes nous amb rendiment a l'alçada dels millors mètodes de l'estat de l'art, alta capacitat i transparència, en el cas de data hiding d'imatges, i robustesa, alta capacitat i baixa distorsió per al watermarking d'àudio.Societat de la informació i el coneixemen

SecMon: End-to-End Quality and Security Monitoring System

The Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is becoming a more available and popular way of communicating for Internet users. This also applies to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems and merging these two have already proven to be successful (e.g. Skype). Even the existing standards of VoIP provide an assurance of security and Quality of Service (QoS), however, these features are usually optional and supported by limited number of implementations. As a result, the lack of mandatory and widely applicable QoS and security guaranties makes the contemporary VoIP systems vulnerable to attacks and network disturbances. In this paper we are facing these issues and propose the SecMon system, which simultaneously provides a lightweight security mechanism and improves quality parameters of the call. SecMon is intended specially for VoIP service over P2P networks and its main advantage is that it provides authentication, data integrity services, adaptive QoS and (D)DoS attack detection. Moreover, the SecMon approach represents a low-bandwidth consumption solution that is transparent to the users and possesses a self-organizing capability. The above-mentioned features are accomplished mainly by utilizing two information hiding techniques: digital audio watermarking and network steganography. These techniques are used to create covert channels that serve as transport channels for lightweight QoS measurement's results. Furthermore, these metrics are aggregated in a reputation system that enables best route path selection in the P2P network. The reputation system helps also to mitigate (D)DoS attacks, maximize performance and increase transmission efficiency in the network.Comment: Paper was presented at 7th international conference IBIZA 2008: On Computer Science - Research And Applications, Poland, Kazimierz Dolny 31.01-2.02 2008; 14 pages, 5 figure

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