IMG-GUARD: Watermark Based Approach for Image Privacy in OSN Framework

A social networking service (also social networking site, SNS or social media) is an online platform that is used by people to build social networks or social relations with another persons who are share their own details or career interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections. Social networking sites are varied and they incorporate a range of new information and various tools such as availability personal computers, mobile devices such as tablet computers and smart phones, digital photo/video/sharing and "web logging" diary entries online (blogging). While Online Social Networks (OSNs) enable users to share photos easily, they also expose users to several privacy threats from both the OSNs and external entities. The current privacy controls on social networks are far from adequate, resulting in inappropriate flows of information when users fail to understand their privacy settings or OSNs fail to implement policies correctly. Social networks may be complicated because of privacy expectations when they reserve the right to analyze uploaded photos using automated watermarking technique. A user who uploads digital data such as image to their home page may wish to share it with only mutual friends, which OSNs partially satisfy with privacy settings. In this paper, we concentrate to solve the privacy violation problem occurred when images are published on the online social networks without the permission. According to such images are always shared after uploading process. Therefore, the digital image watermarking based on DWT co-efficient. Watermark bits are embedded in uploaded images. Watermarked images are shared in user homages can be difficult to misuse by other persons

Watermarking protocol for protecting user\u27s right in content based image retrieval

Content based image retrieval (CBIR) is a technique to search for images relevant to the user&rsquo;s query from an image collection.In last decade, most attention has been paid to improve the retrieval performance. However, there is no significant effort to investigate the security concerning in CBIR. Under the query by example (QBE) paradigm, the user supplies an image as a query and the system returns a set of retrieved results. If the query image includes user&rsquo;s private information, an untrusted server provider of CBIR may distribute it illegally, which leads to the user&rsquo;s right problem. In this paper, we propose an interactive watermarking protocol to address this problem. A watermark is inserted into the query image by the user in encrypted domain without knowing the exact content. The server provider of CBIR will get the watermarked query image and uses it to perform image retrieval. In case where the user finds an unauthorized copy, a watermark in the unauthorized copy will be used as evidence to prove that the user&rsquo;s legal right is infringed by the server provider.<br /

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

A Comprehensive Review on Digital Image Watermarking

The advent of the Internet led to the easy availability of digital data like images, audio, and video. Easy access to multimedia gives rise to the issues such as content authentication, security, copyright protection, and ownership identification. Here, we discuss the concept of digital image watermarking with a focus on the technique used in image watermark embedding and extraction of the watermark. The detailed classification along with the basic characteristics, namely visual imperceptibility, robustness, capacity, security of digital watermarking is also presented in this work. Further, we have also discussed the recent application areas of digital watermarking such as healthcare, remote education, electronic voting systems, and the military. The robustness is evaluated by examining the effect of image processing attacks on the signed content and the watermark recoverability. The authors believe that the comprehensive survey presented in this paper will help the new researchers to gather knowledge in this domain. Further, the comparative analysis can enkindle ideas to improve upon the already mentioned techniques

A Survey on Multimedia Content Protection Mechanisms

Cloud computing has emerged to influence multimedia content providers like Disney to render their multimedia services. When content providers use the public cloud, there are chances to have pirated copies further leading to a loss in revenues. At the same time, technological advancements regarding content recording and hosting made it easy to duplicate genuine multimedia objects. This problem has increased with increased usage of a cloud platform for rendering multimedia content to users across the globe. Therefore it is essential to have mechanisms to detect video copy, discover copyright infringement of multimedia content and protect the interests of genuine content providers. It is a challenging and computationally expensive problem to be addressed considering the exponential growth of multimedia content over the internet. In this paper, we surveyed multimedia-content protection mechanisms which throw light on different kinds of multimedia, multimedia content modification methods, and techniques to protect intellectual property from abuse and copyright infringement. It also focuses on challenges involved in protecting multimedia content and the research gaps in the area of cloud-based multimedia content protection

Privacy-preserving information hiding and its applications

The phenomenal advances in cloud computing technology have raised concerns about data privacy. Aided by the modern cryptographic techniques such as homomorphic encryption, it has become possible to carry out computations in the encrypted domain and process data without compromising information privacy. In this thesis, we study various classes of privacy-preserving information hiding schemes and their real-world applications for cyber security, cloud computing, Internet of things, etc. Data breach is recognised as one of the most dreadful cyber security threats in which private data is copied, transmitted, viewed, stolen or used by unauthorised parties. Although encryption can obfuscate private information against unauthorised viewing, it may not stop data from illegitimate exportation. Privacy-preserving Information hiding can serve as a potential solution to this issue in such a manner that a permission code is embedded into the encrypted data and can be detected when transmissions occur. Digital watermarking is a technique that has been used for a wide range of intriguing applications such as data authentication and ownership identification. However, some of the algorithms are proprietary intellectual properties and thus the availability to the general public is rather limited. A possible solution is to outsource the task of watermarking to an authorised cloud service provider, that has legitimate right to execute the algorithms as well as high computational capacity. Privacypreserving Information hiding is well suited to this scenario since it is operated in the encrypted domain and hence prevents private data from being collected by the cloud. Internet of things is a promising technology to healthcare industry. A common framework consists of wearable equipments for monitoring the health status of an individual, a local gateway device for aggregating the data, and a cloud server for storing and analysing the data. However, there are risks that an adversary may attempt to eavesdrop the wireless communication, attack the gateway device or even access to the cloud server. Hence, it is desirable to produce and encrypt the data simultaneously and incorporate secret sharing schemes to realise access control. Privacy-preserving secret sharing is a novel research for fulfilling this function. In summary, this thesis presents novel schemes and algorithms, including: • two privacy-preserving reversible information hiding schemes based upon symmetric cryptography using arithmetic of quadratic residues and lexicographic permutations, respectively. • two privacy-preserving reversible information hiding schemes based upon asymmetric cryptography using multiplicative and additive privacy homomorphisms, respectively. • four predictive models for assisting the removal of distortions inflicted by information hiding based respectively upon projection theorem, image gradient, total variation denoising, and Bayesian inference. • three privacy-preserving secret sharing algorithms with different levels of generality

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

Watermarking technique for wireless multimedia sensor networks: A state of the art

Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) are an emerging type of sensor network which contain sensor nodes equipped with microphones, cameras, and other sensors that produce multimedia content. These networks have the potential to enable a large class of applications ranging from military to modern healthcare. Multimedia nodes are susceptible to various types of attack, such as cropping, compression, or even physical capture and sensor replacement. Hence, security becomes an important issue in WMSNs. However, given the fact that sensors are resource constrained, the traditional intensive security algorithms are not well suited for WMSNs. This makes the traditional security techniques, based on data encryption, not very suitable for WMSNs. Watermarking techniques are usually computationally lightweight and do not require much memory resources. These techniques are being considered as an attractive alternative to the traditional techniques, because of their light resource requirements. The objective of this paper is to present a critical analysis of the existing state-of-the-art watermarking algorithms developed for WMSNs

Analysis of a buyer-seller watermarking protocol for trustworthy purchasing of digital contents

In ubiquitous environments where human users get to access diverse kinds of (often multimedia enabled) services irrespective of where they are, the issue of security is a major concern. Security in this setting encompasses both in the interest of the human users as well as their information and objects that they own. A typical kind of transaction interaction among users and/or machines in these environments is that of exchanging digital objects via purchases and/or ownership transfers, e.g. someone buying a song from iTunes via his iPhone, or downloading either bought or rented movies onto a portable DVD player. Here, there is a need to provide trustworthy protection of the rights of both parties; i.e. the seller’s copyright needs to be protected against piracy, while on the other hand it has been highlighted in literature the need to protect innocent buyers from being framed. Indeed, if either party cannot be assured that his rights are protected when he is involved in transactions within such environments, he would shy away and instead prefer for instance the more conventional non-digital means of buying and selling. And therefore without active participation from human users and object owners it is difficult to fully kick off the actual realization of intelligent environments. Zhang et al. recently proposed a buyer–seller watermarking protocol without a trusted third party based on secret sharing. While it is a nice idea to eliminate the need of a trusted third party by distributing secret shares between the buyer and the seller such that neither party has knowledge of the fingerprint embedded in a content, we show that it is possible for a buyer to remove his part of the fingerprint from the content he bought. This directly disproves the piracy tracing property claimed by the protocol. In fact, since piracy tracing is one of the earliest security applications of watermarking schemes, it raises doubts as to the soundness of the design of this protocol