Authentication Bits Research Articles

Robust image tamper detection and recovery with self-embedding watermarking using SPIHT and LDPC

In today’s digital landscape, the pervasive use of digital images across diverse domains has led to growing concerns regarding their authenticity and reliability. The potential for malicious manipulation of these images underscores the critical need to develop robust methods for detecting tampering and ensuring their integrity. Fragile watermarking has been found to have extensive applications for tamper detection and recovery. An image watermarking technique for tamper detection, correction, and recovery is presented in this study. The proposed method employs a self-embedding method to generate the reference watermark from the original image, which has the advantage of superior tamper detection, localization, recovery capabilities, and robustness against attacks. Set Partitioning in the Hierarchical Tree (SPIHT) algorithm is applied to generate a reference watermark of the original image. Low-Density Parity Check (LDPC) is employed for error correction, providing higher-quality reconstruction to recover the original image. Schur decomposition processed the watermarked image blocks to generate authentication bits for each block to enhance tampering detection. The proposed watermarking method was evaluated using PSNR, SSIM, BER, and NC metrics for grayscale and colored images. The technique demonstrated high robustness in tamper detection and recovery against various malicious attacks. Comparative analysis with existing methods shows the efficacy of the proposed method.

Data Hiding and Authentication Scheme for Medical Images Using Double POB

To protect the security of medical images and to improve the embedding ability of data in encrypted medical images, this paper proposes a permutation ordered binary (POB) number system-based hiding and authentication scheme for medical images, which includes three parts: image preprocessing, double hiding, and information extraction and lossless recovery. In the image preprocessing and double hiding phase, firstly, the region of significance (ROS) of the original medical image is segmented into a region of interest (ROI) and a region of non-interest (RONI). Then, the bit plane of the ROI and RONI are separated and cross-reorganization to obtain two new Share images. After the two new Share images are compressed, the images are encrypted to generate two encrypted shares. Finally, the embedding of secret data and attaching of authentication bits in each of these two encrypted shares was performed using the POB algorithm. In the information extraction and lossless recovery phase, the POBN algorithm is first used to extract the authentication bits to realize image tamper detection; then, the embedded secret message is extracted, and the original medical image is recovered. The method proposed in this research performs better in data embedding and lossless recovery, as demonstrated by experiments.

A blind recovery technique with integer wavelet transforms in image watermarking

The development of internet technology has simplified the sharing and modification of digital image information. The aim of this study is to propose a new blind recovery technique based on integer wavelets transform (BRIWT) by utilizing their image content. The LSB adjustment technique on the integer wavelet transform is used to embed recovery data into the two least significant bits (LSB) of the image content. Authentication bits are embedded into the current locations of the LSB of the image content, while the recovery information is embedded into different block locations based on the proposed block mapping. The embedded recovery data is securely placed at random locations within the two LSBs using a secret key. A three-layer embedding of authentication bits is used to validate the integrity of the image contents, achieving high precision and accuracy. Tamper localization accuracy is employed to identify recovery bits from the image content. This research also investigates the image inpainting method to enhance recovery from tampered images. The proposed image inpainting is performed by identifying non-tampered pixels in the surrounding tamper localization. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can produce highly watermarked images with imperceptibility, with an average SSIM value of 0.9978 and a PSNR value of 46.20 dB. The proposed scheme significantly improves the accuracy of tamper localization, with a precision of 0.9943 and an accuracy of 0.9971. The proposed recovery technique using integer wavelet transforms achieves high-quality blind recovery with an SSIM value of 0.9934 under a tampering rate of 10%. The findings of this study reveal that the proposed scheme improves the quality of blind recovery by 14.2 % under a tampering rate of 80 %.

C3MW: A novel comprehensive-monitoring-motivated multi-model watermarking scheme for tamper detection and self-recovery

In this paper, we propose a novel Comprehensive-Monitoring-Motivated Multi-model Watermarking (C3MW) Scheme for tampering region localization and self-recovery for 4K images. To generate the Comprehensive-Monitoring-Motivated Multi-model (C3M) Watermark, the Multi-Model Authentication Bits Generation (MMAG) method and the Adaptive Block Significance-Based Recovery Bits Generation (ASRG) method, are proposed. The MMAG aims to monitor the various bit-plane information for detecting the possible tampering in a more comprehensive manner. When performing image tampering detection, once one of the multiple models is triggered, the corresponding parcel will be marked as tampered. On basis of the detected regions, we propose a fine-tuning-based image recovery method, where the extracted recovery data consist of the fused Adaptive Block Significance (ABS) and bitmaps, while the calculated recovery data consist of the watermark information which is calculated from the received image. We conduct experiments on two public databases, respectively, the BOWS2 Dataset and the LIU4K-v2 Dataset. Comparisons with existing state-of-the-art works have been performed on the BOWS2 dataset, and our scheme improves the precision and F1 Score by 7.27% and 3.30%, respectively. It is clear from these results that our method has a better performance than others.

DR-SISM: A dual reversible secret image sharing mechanism

Secret image sharing (SIS) technology has received wide attention from researchers due to its multi-party management of secret information. Traditional SIS algorithms usually convert secret information into the shares of noise-like images, which may attract the attention of hackers and cannot be effectively managed. Moreover, for communication scenario with multiple user participation, participants hope to embed additional data in their shares, while the secret image and the embedded additional information to be reversibly recovered. However, the embedding capacity, security, and authentication capability are limited in the existing SIS algorithms. Therefore, this paper proposes a dual reversible secret image sharing mechanism, called DR-SISM, which includes reversible hiding stage and reversible sharing stage. This proposed DR-SISM can simultaneously achieve the reversible recovery of secret image and additional data embedded. In the first stage, a reversible data hiding method is constructed that leverages the predictive technique of median edge detection to obtain the layered label map for capturing a higher embedding load and utilizes the bit-plane replacement technique to embed additional information. In the second stage, a novel (k,n) threshold reversible SIS strategy is presented by employing the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT), which can generate visually meaningful shares. The authentication bits produced by employing the hash function are embedded into the share, which are utilized to compare with the authentication bits owned by users for verifying the identities of the participants before the secret image reconstruction. Through the comparison of advanced SIS algorithms, our proposed DR-SISM in this article is preferred over the recent algorithms in respect of embedding capacity, security, and authentication capability.

An efficient fragile watermarking scheme for tamper localization in satellite images

The applications of satellite images in various fields like oceanography, agriculture, biodiversity conservation, forestry, landscape, geology, regional planning, intelligence, and warfare are growing at a burgeoning rate. As satellite images carry very sensitive information, they need a secure and verifiable transmission over the network. To address the sensitive authentication issue and making the satellite images verifiable, this paper proposes an efficient ROI-based blind fragile watermarking approach. The proposed approach bundles the capability to not only verify the integrity of the watermarked satellite image but can also localize the regions where any intentional or unintentional tampering occurred in the watermarked satellite images with more than 90% accuracy. The proposed approach also achieves a good imperceptibility between the cover and watermarked satellite image in terms of PSNR (Average 60 dB). In the proposed approach, eight dynamically evolved progenies are generated corresponding to every ROI pixel. These progenies are tightly associated with each other at the bit level. The proposed approach hosts a sequence of algorithms, which when applied to these progenies, generates an authentication bit for every corresponding ROI pixel. The generated authentication bit is then embedded into the different intensities of RONI pixels. The selection of the number of bits per pixel to embed the watermark is decided dynamically. Detailed experimental results using various subjective and objective evaluation parameters have been presented to substantiate the imperceptibility and tamper localization capabilities of our proposed approach.

A Fragile Image Watermarking Scheme in DWT Domain Using Chaotic Sequences and Error-Correcting Codes.

With the rapid development of digital signal processing tools, image contents can be easily manipulated or maliciously tampered with. Fragile watermarking has been largely used for content authentication purposes. This article presents a new proposal for image fragile watermarking algorithms for tamper detection and image recovery. The watermarked bits are obtained from the parity bits of an error-correcting code whose message is formed from a binary chaotic sequence (generated from a secret key known to all legitimate users) and from bits of the original image. Part of the codeword (the chaotic bits) is perfectly known to these users during the extraction phase, adding security and robustness to the watermarking method. The watermarked bits are inserted at specific sub-bands of the discrete wavelet transform of the original image and are used as authentication bits for the tamper detection process. The imperceptibility, detection, and recovery of this algorithm are tested for various common attacks over digital images. The proposed algorithm is analyzed for both grayscale and colored images. Comparison results reveal that the proposed technique performs better than some existing methods.

RSIS: A Secure and Reliable Secret Image Sharing System Based on Extended Hamming Codes in Industrial Internet of Things

In the industrial Internet of Things (IoT), large amounts of image data are collected, stored, and transmitted by low-power cooperative sensors and heterogeneous devices, such as monitoring pictures taken by surveillance cameras in intelligent transportation. Thus, the increasing image data would be outsourced and shared between different distributed servers. Recently, some secret image sharing with authentication (SISA) schemes were proposed, which can provide image sharing in the distributed IoT system. However, if the IoT data are tampered with by malicious attackers, the error cannot be corrected, which causes unreliability and data loss. Therefore, in order to solve the above issues, we propose a secure and reliable secret image-sharing system based on extended Hamming codes (RSIS) in IoT. In RSIS, a novel distributed IoT architecture-based secret sharing is proposed. A secret image is shared into a series of stego-images. These stego-images can be distributed among multiple edge servers in IoT, which is not easy to attract attentions of attackers. In RSIS, check bits generated by authentication bits and hamming code are embedded into the stego-images to identify the tampered places with a high probability. Theoretical analysis and experiments prove that the proposed scheme achieves a high authentication capability, and the bit errors of data can be accurately detected and corrected. Generally, the scheme is effective and practical.

AuSR2: Image watermarking technique for authentication and self-recovery with image texture preservation

This paper presents an image watermarking technique for authentication and self-recovery called AuSR2. The AuSR2 scheme partitions the cover image into 3 × 3 non-overlapping blocks. The watermark data is embedded into two Least Significant Bit (LSB), consisting of two authentication bits and 16 recovery bits for each block. The texture of each block is preserved in the recovery data. Thus, each tampered pixel can be recovered independently instead of using the average block. The recovery process may introduce the tamper coincidence problem, which can be solved using image inpainting. The AuSR2 implements the LSB shifting algorithm to increase the imperceptibility by 2.8%. The experimental results confirm that the AuSR2 can accurately detect the tampering area up to 100%. The AuSR2 can recover the tampered image with a PSNR value of 38.11 dB under a 10% tampering rate. The comparative analysis proves the superiority of the AuSR2 compared to the existing schemes.

Verifiable medical images for E-healthcare: A novel watermarking approach using robust bit-wise association of self-mutating offsprings of pixels

In the current difficult time of COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing is a common practice adopted by healthy and infected people all over the world. Because of this, electronic healthcare and Telemedicine are coming up a big way. One of the most vital challenges in E-healthcare or telemedicine is the authentication and secure transmission of medical images received by an expert(doctor) at a far-off location from the sender(patient). To address the critical authentication issue, this paper proposes a blind pixel-based self-embedding fragile watermarking approach that is effective enough to localize the tampered region with more than 90% accuracy. The self-embedding approach plays a significant role in fragile watermarking for detecting the tampered region at the receiver side. Most of the self-embedding-based fragile watermarking approaches available in the literature are block-based which has a high False Positive Rate(FPR). In the proposed approach, every pixel of the image dynamically generates eight self-mutating offsprings and gets associated with them tightly at bit level. After a systematic set of procedures on that offsprings with a triple layer of security, a single authentication bit is selected using 16 × 1 multiplexer for each pixel intensity of the image. That is why the proposed approach has a high imperceptibility level (more than 60 dB PSNR). Experimental results confirm the efficacy of the proposed approach in terms of imperceptibility and tamper detection rate.

Medical images lossless recovery based on POB number system and image compression.

To protect the information integrity of the medical images, this paper proposes a secure lossless recovery scheme for medical images based on image block compression and permutation ordered binary (POB) number system, which includes two parts: share generation, and lossless recovery. In the shares generation stage, the region of interest (ROI) of the original medical image and the image block compression coding algorithm JPEG-LS, are firstly adopted to generate the compressed data, which can use limited storage space to place the data repeatedly. Then, after separating the bit-plane, the compressed data are executed by data reorganization and data encryption respectively on the high-plane and the low-plane. Finally, two authentication bits are extracted by 8-bit pixel of two planes to be inserted into the pixel itself, and then the 10-bit pixel is converted into an 8-bit POB value to produce two shares of ShareH and ShareL, respectively. In the lossless recovery stage, data of placing repeatedly can restore the original image. At the same time, three attacks are carried in the two shares, which contain content cropping, content exchange, and text addition. Some comparisons with other schemes present that the proposed scheme implements a better performance under some criteria. Theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the original image can be recovered losslessly even if two shares are tampered at the ration more than 50%.

Three Layer Authentications with a Spiral Block Mapping to Prove Authenticity in Medical Images

Digital medical image has a potential to be manipulated by unauthorized persons due to advanced communication technology. Verifying integrity and authenticity have become important issues on the medical image. This paper proposed a self-embedding watermark using a spiral block mapping for tamper detection and restoration. The block-based coding with the size of 3×3 was applied to perform self-embedding watermark with two authentication bits and seven recovery bits. The authentication bits are obtained from a set of condition between sub-block and block image, and the parity bits of each sub-block. The authentication bits and the recovery bits are embedded in the least significant bits using the proposed spiral block mapping. The recovery bits are embedded into different sub-blocks based on a spiral block mapping. The watermarked images were tested under various tampered images such as blurred image, unsharp-masking, copy-move, mosaic, noise, removal, and sharpening. The experimental results show that the scheme achieved a PSNR value of about 51.29 dB and a SSIM value of about 0.994 on the watermarked image. The scheme showed tamper localization with accuracy of 93.8%. In addition, the proposed scheme does not require external information to perform recovery bits. The proposed scheme was able to recover the tampered image with a PSNR value of 40.45 dB and a SSIM value of 0.994.

Blind Dual Watermarking Scheme Using Stucki Kernel and SPIHT for Image Self-Recovery

In this paper we propose a blind dual watermarking scheme using Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT) and Stucki Kernel halftone technique for the tamper detection and image self-recovery. The watermark consists of authentication bits for tampering area location and recovery bits for image restoration. We generate two recovery bits to ensure the high-quality recovery of the tampered image. The primary recovery bit is generated by the SPIHT encoding, and the secondary recovery bit is generated by the Stucki Kernel halftone technique. Then the authentication bit is generated based on the recovery bits. Before embedding the watermark, we shuffle the watermark bits through Arnold cat mapping and diagonal mapping to improve the security and quality of the restored image. LSB-based watermarking technique is used to embed the watermark into the original image to ensure the invisibility of the watermarked image. Experiments have been conducted on two datasets, BOW2 and USC-SIPI, and results show that the proposed scheme can achieve high restoration quality. Comparison with the existing works demonstrate the good performance and superiority of the proposed scheme.

A novel pixel-wise authentication-based self-embedding fragile watermarking method

Self-embedding fragile watermarking algorithms can perform detection of the manipulated areas as well as recovery of these detected areas. Most of the self-embedding fragile watermarking algorithms are performed block-wise authentication approach. However, entire block is marked as tampered in case one of the pixels in the block is detected as manipulated. This situation decreases the accuracy rate of the authentication process especially against pixel-based attacks such as salt and paper noise adding. Therefore, we present a novel pixel-wise authentication-based self-embedding fragile watermarking method for manipulation detection and recovery. In this proposed method, reference image is divided into four main blocks. Then, each main block is subdivided into $$2\times 4$$ or $$4\times 2$$ sized blocks according to block type determined using recovery quality. Recovery bits of each main block generated from sub-blocks are spreaded into the two main blocks in the other half of the image. For each pixel, two authentication bits are generated using the six most significant bits of the pixel with two pixel position bits and then embedded into the first and second least significant bits of the pixel. In experimental results, pixel-based attacks are applied to the images to demonstrate the success of the presented method. Also, performance of the presented method has been evaluated by applying different size of cropping attacks to the watermarked images. Experimental results show that the proposed method satisfactory detect and recover the manipulated areas.

Color image watermarking for content authentication and self-restoration applications based on a dual-domain approach

Digital image watermarking has been witnessed as a powerful tool that can be used in image ownership identification, copyright protection and content authentication applications. In this paper, a dual-domain watermarking scheme for digital image authentication with self-recovery capabilities is proposed. The proposed scheme has a high ability to recover tampered image regions while pertaining high watermarking imperceptibility and high robustness under various types of attacks. The proposed scheme employs two watermarks: 1) content-dependent, and, 2) content-independent, where the content-dependent watermark contains two-bit sequences for authentication and recovery operations. The authentication bits are generated based on the singular value decomposition (SVD) of each block, while the recovery bits are generated from the average value within selected sub-blocks. The independent watermark is embedded using the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), whereas, the dependent watermark is embedded directly into the first and second least significant bits (LSB) of the image pixels. The developed dual-domain watermarking scheme has exhibited high robustness performance against various attacks with high imperceptibility and watermarking capacity as well. For authentication purposes, the proposed scheme incorporated three developed measures to detect the authenticity of the probe image, and, to accurately localize tampered regions. The experimental results have shown that the proposed scheme has a high imperceptibility, compared to other existing schemes, and can effectively distinguish malicious from incidental attacks with accurate tampering localization. Moreover, the proposed scheme exhibits high performance against moderate-to-strong incidental attacks such as noise and low-quality JPEG attacks.

A Dynamically Configurable PUF and Dynamic Matching Authentication Protocol

A physical unclonable function (PUF) is a hardware security primitive, which can be used secure various hardware-based applications. As a type of PUFs, strong PUFs have a large number of challenge-response pairs (CRPs), which can be used for authentication. At present, most strong PUF structures follow a one-to-one input/output relationship, i.e. linear function. As such, strong PUF designs are vulnerable to machine learning (ML) based modeling attacks. To address the issue, a dynamically configurable PUF structure is proposed in this paper. A mathematical model of the proposed dynamic PUF is presented and the design is proposed against the effective ML based attacks, such as deep neural network (DNN), logistic regression (LR) and reliability-based covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategies (CMA-ES). Experimental results on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) show that the proposed dynamic structure has achived good uniqueness and reliability. It is also shown that the dynamic PUF has a strong resistance to the CMA-ES attack. Due to the dynamic nature of the proposed PUF structure, an authentication protocol is also designed to generate recognizable authentication bits string. The protocol shows strong resistance to classical machine learning attacks including the new variant of CMA-ES.

QR-3S: A High Payload QR Code Secret Sharing System for Industrial Internet of Things in 6G Networks

The communication in a 6G-enabled network in a box (NIB) needs to meet the characteristics of fast, convenient, and safe. Secret sharing scheme has become a hot topic nowadays due to unconditional security and simple decryption. At the same time, a quick response (QR) code as a popular carrier has been widely applied in various industrial applications because of the data payload and convenience. Thus, the combination of secret sharing and QR code provides a solution by satisfying the requirements of 6G-enabled NIB. In this article, we design a QR code secret sharing scheme with authentication to protect private data and prevent cheater. In this scheme, a secret image is first divided into a series of shadows based on a polynomial, and authentication bits are generated based on the generated shadows. Then shadows and the authentication bits are embedded into the cover QR codes according to the error correction redundancy and the homomorphism of the Reed-Solomon code in the QR code. In addition, the secret can be restored with the qualified shares and the authentication bits could verify the authenticity of the embedded shadows. Compared with existing schemes, the proposed scheme not only guarantees a high capacity but also embeds more authentication bits to improve the authentication ability. In addition, experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed scheme is both robust and secure.

Image Security using Self embedding Fragile Watermarking Method

Rapid development in technology to provide security to data in the form of images is a major issue. So to provide security to the original image, watermark image embedded in it. In this paper we use self embedded watermark using fragile watermark technique. Authenticity of an image can be tested using block based technique of self embedding fragile watermarking; to represent the entire image the feature image watermark is used. In each 2x2non overlapping block four authentication bits and eight recovery bits are generated. In each block three least significant bits are embedded with authentication bits and recovery bits are embedded in the three least significant bits of the mapped block This paper mainly summarizes the Selection of image, method of watermark insertion, detection and tamper localization and recovery procedure. The experimental results of this proposed method shows visual quality of image recovery better than some of the schemes.

Tampering Reveal Technique for Iris Images

Nowadays, many biometric based security systems depend on the iris images for authentication because of their features and ease of use. However, storing and sharing these sensitive images through open access networks will expose them to tampering. In order to ensure the safety of the iris images, this paper presents a new tampering reveal technique based on watermarking in the transform domain. In the proposed technique, the iris region is selected and isolated using interactive segmentation process (ISA). The authentication bits have been generated from the iris region (IR) and embedded in the Slantlet transform coefficients of the remaining part of the iris image which has been named as non-iris region (NIR). The use of ISA ensures the intactness of IR because it has been excluded from the embedding process. Several experiments have been conducted to test the visual quality, capacity, payload, and the tampering reveal performance. The experiments proved the ability of the proposed technique to reveal and localize any tampering in IR, in addition, the difference between the original iris image and the watermarked iris image is imperceptible

DWT-SISA: a secure and effective discrete wavelet transform-based secret image sharing with authentication

Recently, Secret Image Sharing (SIS) has attracted more and more researchers’ attention, in which a secret image is divided into several shadows for sharing. In practice, the produced shadows are meaningless, and are easy to be attacked if that shadows are directly used in transmission. In order to overcome the shortcoming, the shadows would be embedded into the cover image so as to be transmitted to participants securely. The embedding methods of most schemes are based on Least Significant Bit (LSB) replacement in the spatial domain, however, the embedded data can be easily detected by steganalysis algorithm. Moreover, the embedding capacity, visual quality and security need to be improved. In this paper, a secure and effective Discrete Wavelet Transform-based Secret Image Sharing with Authentication (DWT-SISA) is proposed. In DWT-SISA, the carrier has a better embedding capacity and a better visual quality after embedding. Furthermore, for the sake of solving the issue of cheater prevention, more authentication bits are embedded into the carrier. The experimental results and theoretical analysis show that the proposed scheme is secure and effective.