Buyer-seller Watermarking Protocol Research Articles

Blockchain and Smart Contracts for Digital Copyright Protection

In a global context characterized by a pressing need to find a solution to the problem of digital copyright protection, buyer-seller watermarking protocols based on asymmetric fingerprinting and adopting a “buyer-friendly” approach have proven effective in addressing such a problem. They can ensure high levels of usability and security. However, they usually resort to trusted third parties (TTPs) to guarantee the protection process, and this is often perceived as a relevant drawback since TTPs may cause conspiracy or collusion problems, besides the fact that they are generally considered as some sort of “big brother”. This paper presents a buyer-seller watermarking protocol that can achieve the right compromise between usability and security without employing a TTP. The protocol is built around previous experiences conducted in the field of protocols based on the buyer-friendly approach. Its peculiarity consists of exploiting smart contracts executed within a blockchain to implement preset and immutable rules that run automatically under specific conditions without control from some kind of central authority. The result is a simple, usable, and secure watermarking protocol able to do without TTPs.

Vbswp-CeaH: Vigorous Buyer-Seller Watermarking Protocol without Trusted Certificate Authority for Copyright Protection in Cloud Environment through Additive Homomorphism

Cloud-based storage ensures the secure dissemination of media. Authentication and integrity are important aspects in the distribution of digital media. Encryption-based techniques shelter this media between the communicating parties which are involved in a transaction. The challenge is how to restrict the digital media which is illegally redistributed by the authorized users. However, the digital watermarking technique and encryption-based methods are also not sufficient enough to provide copyright protection. The watermarking protocol is used to provide intellectual property for the customer and the service provider. This research paper provides a vigorous buyer-seller watermarking protocol without trusted certificate authority for copyright protection in the cloud environment. This research work uses the cloud environment which enables the cloud as a service infrastructural provider for storing credentials such as public and private secret keys and the digital certificates of interacting parties. The scheme uses additive homomorphism encryption with an effective key exchange algorithm for exchanging digital media. This proposed approach addresses the problems of anonymity and copy deterrence and protects the digital rights of the buyer and seller; these most up-to-date issues are related to information security. Furthermore, the experiment results conclude that the proposed protocol is flexible and secure even in a non-secure communication channel. We have used performance measures such as PSNR, NCC and cost in time methods for checking the integrity of the proposed protocol. The conducted experiments show a stronger robustness and high imperceptibility for the watermark and watermarked images.

A cloud-based buyer-seller watermarking protocol (CB-BSWP) using semi-trusted third party for copy deterrence and privacy preserving.

Nowadays, cloud computing provides a platform infrastructure for the secure dealing of digital data, but privacy and copy control are the two important issues in it over a network. Cloud data is available to the end user and requires enormous security and privacy techniques to protect the data. Moreover, the access control mechanism with encryption-based technique protects the digital rights for participants in a transaction, but they do not protect the media from being illegally redistributed and do not restrict an authorized user to reveal their secret information this is referred to as you can access but you cannot leak. This brought out a need for controlling copy deterrence and preserving the privacy of digital media over the internet. To overlook this, we proposed a cloud-based buyer-seller watermarking protocol (CB-BSWP) with the use of a semi-trusted third party for copy deterrence and privacy-preserving in the cloud environment. The suggested scheme uses 1) a privacy homomorphism cryptosystem with Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm to provide an encrypted domain for the secure exchange of digital media 2) adopt robust and fair watermarking techniques to ensure high imperceptibility and robustness for the watermarked images against attacks 3) two services of cloud Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to support virtualized computing infrastructure and Watermarking as a service (WaaS) to execute the speedy process of watermarking, this process is supported by watermarking generation and signing phase (WGSP) and watermark extraction and verifying phase reported in 4th section. 4) cloud service provider (CSP) considered as a “semi-trusted” third party to reduce the burden from the trusted third party (TTP) server and provide storage for the encrypted digital media on cloud databases, this frees content owner from not having a separate storage infrastructure. The proposed scheme encrypts the digital content by using SHA-512 algorithm with key size 512-bits to ensure that it doesn’t affect computational time during the process of encryption. The suggested scheme addresses the problems of piracy tracing, anonymity, tamper resistance, non-framing, customer rights problem. The role of cloud is crucial because it reduces communication overhead, provides unlimited storage, supports the watermarking process and offers a solution for the secure distribution of end-to-end security of digital content over cloud. To check the performance of the suggested CB-BSWP protocol against common image processing attacks, we have conducted experiments in which the perceptual quality of watermarked digital media was found enhanced, resulting in a robust watermark.

A lightweight buyer-seller watermarking protocol based on time-stamping and composite signal representation

The protocol allows a content provider to detect duplicate copy of a digital content and restrict the content provider who blames the innocent customer. This paper, proposed a lightweight protocol, which uses composite signal representation and time-stamping for watermark embedding and extraction. We have used timestamp, which tells at what time the digital content was created, signed or verified to digital watermarking algorithms and uses the composite signal representation for minimizing the overhead and bandwidth due to the use of composite signals. The suggested protocol uses composite signal representations and timestamp based methods with digital watermarking scheme for content authentication. Our watermark embedding and detection algorithm achieves a balance between robustness and image visual quality. Simulation results demonstrate that the algorithm used by proposed protocol has an increase robustness and good quality of watermark images as well and withstand against various image-processing attacks.

A buyer-seller watermarking protocol for digital secondary market

In the digital right management value chain, digital watermarking technology plays a very important role in digital product’s security, especially on its usage tracking and copyrights infringement authentication. However, watermark procedures can only effectively support copyright protection processes if they are applied as part of an appropriate watermark protocol. In this regard, a number of watermark protocols have been proposed in the literature and have been shown to facilitate the use of digital watermarking technology as copyright protection. One example of such protocols is the anonymous buyer-seller watermarking protocol. Although there are a number of protocols that have been proposed in the literature and provide suitable solutions, they are mainly designed as a watermarking protocol for the first-hand market and are unsuitable for second-hand transactions. As the complexity of online transaction increases, so does the size of the digital second-hand market. In this paper, we present a new buyer-seller watermark protocol that addresses the needs of customer’s rights problem in the digital secondary market. The proposed protocol consists of five sub-protocols that cover the registration process, watermarking process for the first, second and third-hand transactions as well as the identification & arbitration processes. This paper provides analysis that compares the proposed protocols with existing state-of-the-arts and shows that it has met not only all the buyer’s and seller’s requirements in the traditional sense but also accommodates the same requirements in the secondary market.

A new buyer-seller watermarking protocol without multiple watermarks insertion

Watermarking protocols are designed for tracing illegal distributors when unauthorized copies are found. So far, most of the proposed schemes set up two or more watermarks embedded to a copy by the seller before it was sold. The main potential concerns of multiple watermarking are the image quality would be damaged and any earlier embedded watermarks would be destroyed as well. Thanks to visual cryptography which encodes the secret image into two shares, and recovers the secret by collecting these two shares. Therefore, a new buyer-seller watermarking protocol is proposed in this paper by applying the technique of visual cryptography to Lei et al.'s scheme so as to free from the disadvantages of multiple-watermarking insertion.

Modified Buyer Seller Watermarking Protocol based on Discrete Wavelet Transform and Principal Component Analysis

This digital watermarking protocol is basically applied to preserve the rights for both parties involving in E-commerce i.e. buyer and seller. Principal component analysis is used to reduce the correlation coefficient. This protocol uses wavelet transform with principal component analysis and integrates digital watermarking techniques and public key cryptosystem for proving the ownership of digital content. In this paper a watermark image that i.e. baby image is inserted into selected high frequency sub-bands of discrete wavelet transformed. Then we have applied the principal component analysis transformation for selecting the blocks. The process for selecting the blocks are depends by calculating the energy of every block and then the maximum energy blocks were selected. We have calculated parameters such as PSNR and NCC for checking the imperceptibility and robustness of the proposed approach.

DCT and Homomorphic Encryption based Watermarking Scheme in Buyer-seller Watermarking Protocol

Buyer-seller watermarking protocol is defined as the practice of imperceptible altering a digital content to embed a message using watermarking in the encryption domain. This protocol is acknowledged as one kind of copyright protection techniques in electronic commerce. Buyer-seller watermarking protocol is fundamentally based on public-key cryptosystem that is operating using the algebraic property of an integer. However, in general usage, digital contents which are handled in watermarking scheme mostly exist as real numbers in frequency domain through DCT, DFT, DWT, etc. Therefore, in order to use the watermarking scheme in a cryptographic protocol, digital contents that exist as real number must be transformed into integer type through preprocessing beforehand. In this paper, we presented a new watermarking scheme in an encrypted domain in an image that is based on the block-DCT framework and homomorphic encryption method for buyer-seller watermarking protocol. We applied integral-processing in order to modify the decimal layer. And we designed a direction-adaptive watermarking scheme by analyzing distribution property of the frequency coefficients in a block using JND threshold. From the experimental results, the proposed scheme was confirmed to have a good robustness and invisibility.

A Verifiable and Secret Buyer–Seller Watermarking Protocol

ABSTRACTA trusted third party (TTP) is introduced to the buyer–seller protocol to guarantee the transaction fairness in protocol. However, the TTP practically increases the cost in the buyer–seller protocol. To address this issue, we propose a novel buyer–seller watermarking protocol to eliminate the need for a TTP. By dividing the buyer's secret key into two primary mechanisms: the buyer's watermark, embedded in digital content, and the transaction number produced by the seller; the seller can verify buyer's watermark without decryption. After inserting a digital watermark from the seller, the buyer cannot remove the watermark from the digital content without a watermark extraction algorithm. The seller cannot fabricate piracy to frame an innocent buyer. When piracy is found, it can be traced clearly because of the privacy homomorphism property. In other words, the proposed protocol can trace piracy and protect the customer's rights without a TTP. Therefore, the conspiracy problem can be solved. The proposed protocol also can protect the anonymity of the buyer and bind the buyer's watermark to digital content. Moreover, the buyer is no longer required to participate in the dispute resolution in our scheme.

Editorial (Thematic Issue: Computer Networks and Communications in Multimedia and Information Technology)

Networks and communications are the infrastructure on which multimedia and information technologies are built. There are a vast number of networking techniques that depend on the type of multimedia and information technology applications that the network is designed to facilitate. This issue concerns recent communication technologies for transmission, compression, security, and expression of a diverse range of data. In this issue, we discuss how networking techniques are applied in the areas of health, business and transport, which require multimedia and information. This special issue should provide insight into the design of networking technology for applications ranging from sensor networks to broadband networks. The first contribution, published by T. Huynh and W. Hwang, concerns throughput optimization in multicast wireless networks. Various applications, including mobile multimedia, airports, smart homes and audio–video conferencing, require multicast communication to deliver large volumes of data to a group of users. It is important that multiple users receive the same data simultaneously via a reliable transmission network. In this paper, the authors describe an analytical model used to characterize throughput optimization that guarantees the reliability of transmission. In the second contribution, G. Chung and H. Kim introduce digital yarns (or conductive yarns), which enable data transmission. These yarns are particularly interesting in that they can form a crucial element of wearable computing devices, creating a body area network. In particular, smart clothes woven from both ordinary and digital yarns are promising for future applications in many areas of our everyday lives. In this paper, the authors describe the concept of healthwear, with electro cardiogram (ECG) sensors connected using digital yarns. The third contribution is from J. Shim and J. Ko, and discusses the design and implementation of an Ethernet–xBee bridge module for wireless sensor networks, termed Eth2Bee. A wireless sensor network consists of spatially distributed autonomous sensors that monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound or pressure. Eth2Bee can connect wireless networks to the Internet and provide a low-cost gateway technology for the Internet of Things (IoT). The fourth contribution concerns social networking. Yao Meng discusses the use of social media to promote physical activity. In particular, social influence is an effective method of effecting change in attitudes and behavior. She reports a field-study whereby participants used a walking promotion system, which implements workout groups and competition to encourage physical activity. She found that these workout groups, and the associated competition, had a significant effect on the likelihood of participants to use the system. The final contribution to this special issue concerns mobile secure transmission. With the rapid growth of the threedimensional (3D) content industry, 3D mobile secure transmission has recently become important, and digital watermarking and cryptographic protocols have been evaluated. Mobile 3D content, e.g., in mobile 3D games, often requires content security for copyright protection and piracy tracing of 3D graphic models. S. Lee and K. Kwon present a multiple watermarking scheme that uses the anonymous Buyer-Seller watermarking protocol. The method described in this paper can enable copyright protection and measure to prevent illegal copying. Consequently, I sincerely hope that this special issue will be enjoyable and useful to the readers.

구매자-판매자 워터마킹 프로토콜상에서 DCT 기반의 방향성 적응 워터마킹

Buyer-seller watermarking protocol is one of the copyright protection techniques which combine a cryptographic protocol used in electronic commerce with a digital wetermarking scheme aiming at proving the ownership of multimedia contents and preventing the illegal reproduction and redistribution of digital contents. In this paper, it is proposed a new watermarking scheme in an encrypted domain in an image that is based on the block-DCT framework. In order to implement watermarking scheme in a public-key cryptosystem, it is divided that frequency coefficients exist as real number into integer and decimal layer. And the decimal layer is modified integer type through integral-processing. Also, for robustness and invisibility required in watermarking scheme, it is designed a direction-adaptive watermarking scheme based on locally edge-properties of each block in an image through analyzing distribution property of the frequency coefficients in a block using JND threshold.

Geometric Multiple Watermarking Scheme for Mobile 3D Content Based on Anonymous Buyer-Seller Watermarking Protocol

This paper presents a multiple-watermarking scheme for copyright protection and the prevention of illegal copying of mobile 3D contents with low resolution. The proposed scheme embeds a unique watermark and a watermark certification authority (WCA) watermark into the spatial and encryption domains of a mobile 3D content based on the buyer?seller watermarking protocol. The seller generates a unique watermark and embeds it into the local maximum curvedness of a 3D object. After receiving the encrypted watermark from the WCA, the seller embeds it into the encrypted vertex data using an operator that satisfies the privacy homomorphic property. The proposed method was implemented using a mobile content tool, and the experimental results verify its capability in terms of copyright protection and the prevention of illegal copying.

Mobile 3D Secure Transmission Based on Anonymous Buyer-Seller Watermarking Protocol

This paper presents a multiple-watermarking scheme for mobile 3D secure transmission. The proposed scheme embeds a unique watermark and a WCA (Watermark Certification Authority) watermark into the spatial and encryption domains of mobile 3D content based on the Anonymous Buyer-Seller Watermarking Protocol. The seller generates a unique watermark and embeds it into the distribution of vertex data of the 3D content object. After receiving the encrypted watermark from the WCA, the seller embeds it into the encrypted vertex data by using an operator that satisfies the privacy homomorphic property. The proposed method was implemented using the mobile content tool, PowerVR MBX. Experimental results verified that the proposed method was capable of copyright protection and preventing illegal copying. The latter was verified by the watermarks being accurately extracted in the case of geometrical attacks. Keywords: Mobile watermarking protocol, buyer-seller watermarking protocol, copyright protection, mobile 3D content, privacy homomorphic property, secure transmission.

Bandwidth efficient buyer-seller watermarking protocol

Digital watermarking has been used widely for the purposes of copyright protection and copy deterrence for multimedia content. In a forensic watermarking architecture, a buyer-seller watermarking protocol can enable a seller to identify a traitor from a pirated copy, while preventing the seller from framing an innocent buyer. Existing schemes are inefficient in practice for their high bandwidth usage. This paper proposes a buyer-seller watermarking protocol that is efficient from the bandwidth usage point of view. First, multicast that is an efficient transport technology for one-to-many communication is exploited, which can reduce the bandwidth usage significantly. Second, symmetric encryption instead of public-key encryption is performed on the multimedia content, which also can reduce the complexity and communication cost.

A Practical BuyerSeller Watermarking Protocol based on Discrete Wavelet Transform

watermarking is the key technology of digital copyright protection. An efficient digital watermarking solution must tackle the problems of copyright protection and trace of pirate copy. Digital water marking is a promising technology to embed information as unperceivable signals in digital contents. It plays a very important role in E-commerce. Buyer-seller watermarking protocols based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) integrate multimedia watermarking and fingerprinting with cryptography, for copyright protection, piracy tracing, and privacy protection. It uses the public key encryption schemes. In this paper we propose a Practical Buyer Seller watermarking protocol based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) which is secure and flexible and gives more security from previous watermarking protocols to both buyer and seller. In this we use Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), arbitrator and watermarking certificate authority (WCA) for better security. The protocol has better security property and higher efficiency. Keywordskey infrastructure; copyright protection; Digital watermarking;

A Privacy-Preserving Buyer–Seller Watermarking Protocol Based on Priced Oblivious Transfer

Buyer-seller watermarking protocols allow copyright protection of digital goods. To protect privacy, some of those protocols provide buyers with anonymity. However, anonymous e-commerce protocols pose several disadvantages, like hindering customer management or requiring anonymous payment mechanisms. Additionally, no existing buyer-seller watermarking protocol provides fair exchange. We propose a novel approach for the design of privacy-preserving buyer-seller watermarking protocols. In our approach, the seller authenticates buyers but does not learn which items are purchased. Since buyers are not anonymous, customer management is eased and currently deployed methods of payment can be utilized. We define an ideal functionality for privacy-preserving copyright protection protocols. To realize our functionality, a protocol must ensure that buyers pay the right price without disclosing the purchased item, and that sellers are able to identify buyers that released pirated copies. We construct a protocol based on priced oblivious transfer and on existing techniques for asymmetric watermark embedding. Furthermore, we implement and evaluate the efficiency of our protocol, and we explain how to extend it in order to achieve optimistic fair exchange.

A Provably Secure Anonymous Buyer–Seller Watermarking Protocol

Buyer-seller watermarking (BSW) protocols allow copyright protection of digital content. The protocol is anonymous when the identity of buyers is not revealed if they do not release pirated copies. Existing BSW protocols are not provided with a formal analysis of their security properties. We employ the ideal-world/real-world paradigm to propose a formal security definition for copyright protection protocols, and we analyze an anonymous BSW protocol and prove that it fulfills our definition. Additionally, we implement the protocol and measure its efficiency.

A Secure and Efficient Buyer-Seller Watermarking Protocol

A number of different buyer-seller watermarking protocols have been proposed to address preserving the rights of both the buyer and the seller. However, these existing schemes are inefficient and impractical for their high computation and bandwidth overhead. To this end, we propose a new buyer-seller watermarking protocol, where the multimedia data is encrypted using a symmetric cipher, and the public-key cipher is only used to key exchanging and data signing. Compared with the existing schemes, our scheme requires a lower computing power and communication bandwidth. In addition, some main drawbacks of those previous schemes are overcome in our scheme.

Effective watermarking scheme in the encrypted domain for buyer–seller watermarking protocol

In most watermarking schemes for copyright protection, a seller usually embeds a watermark in multimedia content to identify a buyer. When an unauthorized copy is found by the seller, the traitor’s identity can be traced by the embedded watermark. However, it incurs both repudiation issue and framing issue. To solve these problems, some buyer–seller watermarking protocols have been proposed based on watermarking scheme in the encrypted domain. In this paper, an enhanced watermarking scheme is presented. Compared with Solanki et al.’s scheme, the enhanced scheme increases effective watermarking capacity, avoids additional overhead and overcomes an inherent flaw that watermarking capacity depends on the probability distribution of input watermark sequence. Based on the security requirements of buyer–seller watermarking protocols, a new watermarking scheme in the encrypted domain with flexible watermarking capacity is proposed. It improves the robustness of watermark sequence against image compressions and enables image tampering detection. Watermark extraction is blind, which employs the same threshold criterion and secret keys as watermark embedding. Experimental results demonstrate that the enhanced watermarking scheme eliminates the drawbacks of Solanki et al.’s scheme and that the proposed watermarking scheme in the encrypted domain outperforms Kuribayashi and Tanaka’s scheme.

Analysis and enhancement of a watermarking protocol suitable for web context

A buyer-seller watermarking protocol is a combination of traditional watermarking and fingerprinting techniques. Recently, Frattolillo proposed such a watermarking protocol suitable for web context. Frattolillo’s scheme has two problems which would make it hard to implement practically. Several possible solutions to the two problems are presented in this paper.