Improving ANiTW Performance Using Bigrams Character Encoding and Identity-Based Signature

Abstract

Several threats, such as misinformation and hoax, exist in social media as a frequently used technology to exchange information. These threats can be prevented if the reader can verify the message’s content integrity and source authenticity. One recent solution to overcome these threats was proposed by Ahvanooey et al. called ANiTW. ANiTW uses an invisible text watermarking scheme to verify social media message integrity and identify the message source. However, ANiTW is still vulnerable to undetected malicious text modification. Moreover, ANiTW has no tools to authenticate the extracted message source. The proposed method aims to overcome those vulnerabilities and improve ANiTW performance as a tool to verify message content integrity and message source authenticity in social media. To overcome vulnerabilities in ANITW, a part of the message hash and IBS-based signature is introduced as the watermark. The message integrity is verifiable by using part of the message hash as a watermark to detect any malicious. Moreover, implementing an IBS-based signature enables any reader to verify the message source’s authenticity easily. In addition, to improve ANITW performance in embedding capacity and invisibility, a novel bigram-based character encoding and embedding rule are also introduced. Based on the experiment and analysis result, it is proven that the proposed method can perform better than ANiTW in the security, embedding capacity, and invisibility aspects.