The increasing availability and distribution of multimedia technology has made the manipulation of digital images, videos or audio files easy. While this enables numerous new applications, a certain loss of trust in digital media can be observed. In general, there is no guarantee that a digital image "does not lie", i.e., that the image content was not altered. To counteract this risk, fragile watermarks were proposed to protect the integrity of digital multimedia objects. In high security applications, it is necessary to be able to reconstruct the original object out of the watermarked version. This can be achieved by the use of invertible watermarks. While traditional watermarking schemes introduce some small non-invertible distortion in the digital content, invertible watermarks can be completely removed from a watermarked work. In the past, the security of proposed image authentication schemes based on invertible watermarks was only analyzed using ad-hoc methods and neglected the possibility of malicious attacks, which aim at engineering a fake mark so that the attacked object appears to be genuine. In this paper, we characterize and analyze possible malicious attacks against watermark-based image authentication systems and explore the theoretical limits of previous constructions with respect to their security.

Date Published: 22 June 2004
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 5306, Security, Steganography, and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents VI, (22 June 2004); doi: 10.1117/12.525721

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5306:
Security, Steganography, and Watermarking of Multimedia Contents VI
Edward J. Delp III; Ping W. Wong, Editor(s)