On the Security of A Copyright Protection Scheme Based on Visual Cryptography

[[abstract]]With copyright protection in mind, the robustness property of a new scheme is always one of main concerns. However, to claim robustness of watermarking techniques is meaningful only when the false positive probability is taken into consideration as well as robustness benchmark. In this paper, the security of a robust copyright-protection scheme based on visual cryptography proposed by Lou et al. is analyzed. We show that the false alarm of their scheme is not neglectable. Precisely, it is insecure since the verification watermark can be unreasonably extracted from other unprotected images using the identical secret key by the owner. The main weak design will be proved and shown by means of giving theoretical analysis and conducting some counter experiments

A Color Image Copyright Protection Scheme Based on Visual Cryptography and Discrete Cosine Transform

[[abstract]]In this paper, a copyright protection scheme based on visual cryptography and discrete cosine transform for colour images is proposed. Note that the watermark emphasized here is a colour watermark. Instead of hiding a watermark in a colour image for identifying the ownership of the image, all that is required is to construct an ownership share according to a master share created from the colour image by applying discrete cosine transform plus a watermark used for copyright certification. By stacking the master share and the ownership share together, the watermark for ownership identification can be revealed through the utilization of visual cryptography plus a little additional computation. Additionally, the present scheme is also extremely suitable for multiple watermarking. The security of this scheme can be guaranteed via a pseudo random mechanism and the feature of visual cryptography. With substantial experimental results, the robustness of this scheme can be demonstrated against various image processing attacks

Ensuring patients privacy in a cryptographic-based-electronic health records using bio-cryptography

Several recent works have proposed and implemented cryptography as a means to preserve privacy and security of patients health data. Nevertheless, the weakest point of electronic health record (EHR) systems that relied on these cryptographic schemes is key management. Thus, this paper presents the development of privacy and security system for cryptography-based-EHR by taking advantage of the uniqueness of fingerprint and iris characteristic features to secure cryptographic keys in a bio-cryptography framework. The results of the system evaluation showed significant improvements in terms of time efficiency of this approach to cryptographic-based-EHR. Both the fuzzy vault and fuzzy commitment demonstrated false acceptance rate (FAR) of 0%, which reduces the likelihood of imposters gaining successful access to the keys protecting patients protected health information. This result also justifies the feasibility of implementing fuzzy key binding scheme in real applications, especially fuzzy vault which demonstrated a better performance during key reconstruction

On the Design of Perceptual MPEG-Video Encryption Algorithms

In this paper, some existing perceptual encryption algorithms of MPEG videos are reviewed and some problems, especially security defects of two recently proposed MPEG-video perceptual encryption schemes, are pointed out. Then, a simpler and more effective design is suggested, which selectively encrypts fixed-length codewords (FLC) in MPEG-video bitstreams under the control of three perceptibility factors. The proposed design is actually an encryption configuration that can work with any stream cipher or block cipher. Compared with the previously-proposed schemes, the new design provides more useful features, such as strict size-preservation, on-the-fly encryption and multiple perceptibility, which make it possible to support more applications with different requirements. In addition, four different measures are suggested to provide better security against known/chosen-plaintext attacks.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, IEEEtran.cl

Application of visual cryptography for learning in optics and photonics

In the age data digitalization, important applications of optics and photonics based sensors and technology lie in the field of biometrics and image processing. Protecting user data in a safe and secure way is an essential task in this area. However, traditional cryptographic protocols rely heavily on computer aided computation. Secure protocols which rely only on human interactions are usually simpler to understand. In many scenarios development of such protocols are also important for ease of implementation and deployment. Visual cryptography (VC) is an encryption technique on images (or text) in which decryption is done by human visual system. In this technique, an image is encrypted into number of pieces (known as shares). When the printed shares are physically superimposed together, the image can be decrypted with human vision. Modern digital watermarking technologies can be combined with VC for image copyright protection where the shares can be watermarks (small identification) embedded in the image. Similarly, VC can be used for improving security of biometric authentication. This paper presents about design and implementation of a practical laboratory experiment based on the concept of VC for a course in media engineering. Specifically, our contribution deals with integration of VC in different schemes for applications like digital watermarking and biometric authentication in the field of optics and photonics. We describe theoretical concepts and propose our infrastructure for the experiment. Finally, we will evaluate the learning outcome of the experiment, performed by the students

Robust Digital Video Watermarking using Reversible Data Hiding and Visual Cryptography

Watermarking is a major image processing application used to authenticate user documents by embedding and hiding some authenticated piece of information behind an image, audio or the video file. For example, copyright symbols or signatures are often used. Our proposed work is to develop and implement an improved layered approach to video watermarking. The traditional watermarking approach tends to embed an entire watermark image within each video frame or within random video frames to give the appearance of a hidden watermark to the casual observer. This work proposes a more efficient and secure approach to perform watermarking, by using sub image classification. That is to say, selected frames only will contain a fractional number of pixels from the watermark image. We take k bits from the watermark and store then within a video frame, depending on the size of that watermark image. Our algorithm is capable of hiding high capacity information over video frames. The novel approach is to partially distribute the watermarking data over a set of frames until the entire watermark is eventually distributed throughout the entire video. The originality our technique is that it is a histogram inspired and reversible watermarking approach as defined with visual cryptography. Our approach hides similar watermarking pixels with frames of a similar appearance. Differing sets of watermark pixels are thus embedded within dissimilar frames, thus making the system more robust. It will provide a high degree of authentication, as the extraction of information from a single frame only will not reveal the entire watermarking data, or even give any obvious indication that it contains a fraction of the watermark pixels. The resilience of our technique will be tested by performing various systematic attacks upon a series of videos watermarked in this manner

A review on structured scheme representation on data security application

With the rapid development in the era of Internet and networking technology, there is always a requirement to improve the security systems, which secure the transmitted data over an unsecured channel. The needs to increase the level of security in transferring the data always become the critical issue. Therefore, data security is a significant area in covering the issue of security, which refers to protect the data from unwanted forces and prevent unauthorized access to a communication. This paper presents a review of structured-scheme representation for data security application. There are five structured-scheme types, which can be represented as dual-scheme, triple-scheme, quad-scheme, octal-scheme and hexa-scheme. These structured-scheme types are designed to improve and strengthen the security of data on the application