Content Integrity Verification Research Articles

Real-Time Deepfake Video Detection Using Eye Movement Analysis with a Hybrid Deep Learning Approach

Deepfake technology uses artificial intelligence to create realistic but false audio, images, and videos. Deepfake technology poses a significant threat to the authenticity of visual content, particularly in live-stream scenarios where the immediacy of detection is crucial. Existing Deepfake detection approaches have limitations and challenges, prompting the need for more robust and accurate solutions. This research proposes an innovative approach: combining eye movement analysis with a hybrid deep learning model to address the need for real-time Deepfake detection. The proposed hybrid deep learning model integrates two deep neural network architectures, MesoNet4 and ResNet101, to leverage their respective architectures’ strengths for effective Deepfake classification. MesoNet4 is a lightweight CNN model designed explicitly to detect subtle manipulations in facial images. At the same time, ResNet101 handles complex visual data and robust feature extraction. Combining the localized feature learning of MesoNet4 with the deeper, more comprehensive feature representations of ResNet101, our robust hybrid model achieves enhanced performance in distinguishing between manipulated and authentic videos, which cannot be conducted with the naked eye or traditional methods. The model is evaluated on diverse datasets, including FaceForensics++, CelebV1, and CelebV2, demonstrating compelling accuracy results, with the hybrid model attaining an accuracy of 0.9873 on FaceForensics++, 0.9689 on CelebV1, and 0.9790 on CelebV2, showcasing its robustness and potential for real-world deployment in content integrity verification and video forensics applications.

Design of Enhanced Document HTML and the Reliable Electronic Document Distribution Service

Electronic documents are becoming increasingly popular in various industries and sectors as they provide greater convenience and cost-efficiency than physical documents. PDF is a widely used format for creating and sharing electronic documents, while HTML is commonly used in mobile environments as the foundation for creating web pages displayed on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. HTML is becoming a more critical document format as mobile environments have been raised as the primary communication channel nowadays. However, HTML does not have the standard content integrity feature, and an electronic document based on HTML consists of a set of related files. Therefore, it has a vulnerability in terms of reliable electronic documents. We have proposed Document HTML, a single independent file with extended meta tags, to be a reliable electronic document and Chained Document, a single independent file with a blockchain network to secure content integrity and delivery assurance. In this paper, we improved the definition of Document HTML and researched certified electronic document intermediaries. Additionally, we designed and validated the electronic document distribution service using Enhanced Document HTML for real usability. Moreover, we conducted experimental verification using a tax notification electronic document, which has one of the top distribution volumes in Korea, to confirm how Document HTML provides a content integrity verification feature. Document HTML can be used in an enterprise that must send a reliable electronic document to a customer with an electronic document delivery service provider.

Design of Chained Document HTML Generation Technique Based on Blockchain for Trusted Document Communication

Digital document communication between an enterprise and a customer is becoming a primary form of communication rather than the traditional physical document communication. A PDF document, the most popular document format, provides an identical document layout regardless of OS or device and has a content integrity verification feature with a digital signature. However, it has a bad user experience, such as low readability on a mobile device. On the other hand, an HTML document has a weakness in verifying the content integrity even though it is the primary document format and provides a good user experience on mobile devices. There are certified document services using blockchain technology, but it is still vulnerable to verifying content integrity. Furthermore, research on the document HTML has proposed the trusted document generation technique by HTML conformance and digital signature; however, this research does not provide content delivery verification, and there is a file size overhead. In this paper, we have developed the chained document HTML by defining HTML conformance, digital signature, and blockchain technology. First, the chained document HTML has to embed all resources and does not allow loading content on-demand. Second, the file is signed by a digital signature, and the signature value is added in the file header. Lastly, the metadata to verify the content integrity is inserted in a blockchain node. We have created the chained document HTML generation and verification experiment environment by Ethereum and Python. We have confirmed that the chained document HTML provides content and delivery integrity verification in the research. We expect the chained document HTML will be widely used in document communication between an enterprise and a customer, especially if the document has sensitive personal information that might have a legal dispute.

IEEE Access Special Section: Digital Forensics Through Multimedia Source Inference

With the prevalence of low-cost imaging devices (smartphones, tablets, camcorders, digital cameras, scanners, wearable, and IoT devices), images and videos have become the main modalities of information being exchanged in every walk of life. The ever-increasing convenience of image acquisition has facilitated instant distribution and sharing of multimedia on digital social platforms. In the meantime, powerful multimedia editing tools allow even unskilled people to easily manipulate digital content for malicious or criminal purposes. In all cases where multimedia serves as critical evidence, forensic technologies that help to determine the origin, the authenticity of multimedia sources, and the integrity of multimedia content become essential to forensic investigators. Imaging devices and post-acquisition processing software leave unique “fingerprints” in multimedia content. This allows many challenging problems faced by the multimedia forensics community to be addressed through source inference. Source inference is the task of linking digital content to the source device or platform (e.g., social media such as Facebook) responsible for its creation. It can facilitate applications such as identification and verification of source device and platform, common source inference, content integrity verification, and source-oriented image clustering. It also allows the establishment of digital evidence or the history of multimedia processing steps applied to the content, starting from the acquisition procedure and up to tracking the spread. The recent adoption of multimedia source inference techniques in the law enforcement sector (e.g., U.K. Sussex Police, Guildford Crown Court, and INTERPOL) in real-world criminal cases and child sexual exploitation databases has manifested the significant value of multimedia source inference in the fight against crime. This Special Section in IEEE Access aims to collect a diverse and complementary set of articles that demonstrate new developments and applications in digital forensics through multimedia source inference.

Approaches for preserving content integrity of sensitive online Arabic content: A survey and research challenges

Trends in Internet usage and accessing online content in different languages and formats are proliferating at a considerable speed. There is a vast amount of digital online content available in different formats that are sensitive in nature with respect to writing styles and arrangement of diacritics. However, research done in the area aimed at identifying the necessary techniques suitable for preserving content integrity of sensitive digital online content is limited. So, it is a challenge to determine the techniques most suitable for different formats such as image or binary. Hence, preserving and verifying sensitive content constitutes an emerging problem and calls for timely solutions. The digital Holy Qur'an in Arabic, constitutes, one case of such sensitive content. Due to the different characteristics of the Arabic letters like diacritics (punctuation symbols), kashidas (extended letters) and other symbols, it is very easy to alter the original meaning of the text by simply changing the arrangement of diacritics. This article surveys the different approaches that are presently employed in the process of preserving and verifying the content integrity of sensitive online content. We present the state-of-the-art in content integrity verification and address the existing challenges in preserving the integrity of sensitive texts using the Digital Qur'an as a case study. The proposed taxonomy provides an effective classification and analysis of existing related schemes and their limitations. The paper discusses the recommendations of the expected efficiency of such approaches when applied for use in digital content integrity. Some of the main findings suggest unified approaches of watermarking and string matching approaches can be used to preserve content integrity of any sensitive digital content.

Secure Communication

The idea of e-Commerce is to take advantage of all the possibilities offered by information technology (such as digital communications, multimedia, internet, cell phones, teleconferences, etc.) and to improve the security of various organizations. In the article, the authors focus on securing all the contents of e-Commerce by proposing a public key watermarking algorithm for web content integrity verification. The main purpose of this article is to present a new security system that enables e-Commerce to exchange data more securely and by altering the file content structure, detecting illegal access and stopping the illegal operation. Such system combines the watermarking techniques with the cryptography methods in order to provide the highest visible security component that influences on the end user through its daily payment interaction with business.

Robust Digital Image Watermarking Scheme for Copyright Protection

As the popularity of digital media is growing, and world is becoming smaller, all due to the internet connectivity and WWW phenomena, the copyright protection of intellectual properties have become a necessity for prevention of illegal copying and content integrity verification. Digital watermarking is a technique of embedding some information (usually hidden copyright notices) into an image. The proposed approach a Robust Digital image watermarking algorithm using two levels discrete wavelet transform with Singular value decomposition. Second level DWT is performed on HL sub-band. One of the main contributions of the proposed technique is in decomposing the host image. Primarily the proposed technique aims to improve the robustness of the other watermarking techniques and keeps the watermarked image imperceptible. To increase and control the strength of the watermark, we used a scale factor. Experimental results clearly show that this proposed scheme is quite resilient to various image processing attacks.

Check before storing

In some network and application scenarios, it is useful to cache content in network nodes on the fly, at line rate. Resilience of in-network caches can be improved by guaranteeing that all content therein stored is valid. Digital signatures could be indeed used to verify content integrity and provenance. However, their operation may be much slower than the line rate, thus limiting caching of cryptographically verified objects to a small subset of the forwarded ones. How this affects caching performance? To answer such a question, we devise a simple analytical approach which permits to assess performance of an LRU caching strategy storing a randomly sampled subset of requests. A key feature of our model is the ability to handle traffic beyond the traditional Independent Reference Model, thus permitting us to understand how performance vary in different temporal locality conditions. Results, also verified on real world traces, show that content integrity verification does not necessarily bring about a performance penalty; rather, in some specific (but practical) conditions, performance may even improve.

A secure high capacity full-gray-scale-level multi-image information hiding and secret image authentication scheme via Tchebichef moments

The growth of image processing tools and applications has made it easy for multi-media content such as music, audio, and video to be manipulated or forged during transmission over the Internet. Efforts, such as information hiding in steganography, have been unable to secure data transmission and prevent its manipulation. Usage of coding theory, including cryptography, is not full proof in the sense that an unauthorized intruder may inject (tampering) and incorporate unintended data to the messages, which can tamper the transmitted data. There is a need for more transparent message information hiding schemes along with information content verification and authentication, as well as accurate tampering detection. In particular, as it is well known, in many current steganography methods, widely used for image information hiding, there are various technical challenges associated with hiding large amounts of image information in images. Some of these challenges relate to which locations, in a given carrier image, information has to be hidden in order to guarantee transparency of the resulting watermarked images, to the ability to extract hidden information accurately, to the performance of hidden secret information authentication and verification at the receiving end, to the dependency of the hidden information on a given carrier image, to the robustness of information hiding schemes to affine transformations such as rotation, and to the amount of data and number of full-scale images one can embed in a given single image carrier. Additionally, as it is well known, many of the existing stenography methods are based on the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), the Discrete Cosine Directors (DCT), or the Discrete Wavelength Transform (DWT) methods, which result in high Bit Error Rate (BER) of the extracted data. In this paper we present a secure high capacity image information hiding scheme where two full separate arbitrary full-scale gray level images (versus binary), one hidden information image and one authentication watermark image are hidden/embedded in the Tchebichef moments of a carrier image with very high imperceptibility. Here the second watermark image is used for identification and content integrity verification and authentication of the hidden secret image. Both the hidden secret hidden image and the authentication watermark image are of the same size as that of a given arbitrary carrier image. In particular, with the cost of computer memory getting lower and the bandwidth of transmission channels getting larger, we show how three different watermarked images, but the same to a naked eye, are produced and transmitted to achieve the desired advantages of high accuracy, security, authentication and verification of the recovered information. To the best of our knowledge, this two-full-scale gray images data hiding and hidden secret image information verification and authentication method is the first attempt of its sort. We show here the robustness of the proposed scheme to affine transformations such as rotation, scaling, and translation, the proposed scheme's high image malicious tampering detection and tampering localization and its high quality extracted recovered and authenticated hidden secret images. Additionally, in order to as much as possible keep the integrity of the received information, when watermarked images are rotated during transmission, a new image rotation estimation and recovery algorithm is presented as part of the proposed information hiding scheme. We show the effect of intended tampering attacks namely, cropping, noise, low-pass and high-pass filtering on the presented scheme. We also show how the extracted information accuracy is generally independent of the carrier image, and we present a mathematical analysis for characterizing the conditions under which transparency of the hidden embedded information is generally achieved for any given arbitrary carrier image. The case of how to extract the hidden information when one or two of the watermarked images is (are) lost is also tackled. Finally, experimental results on real images are presented to illustrate the efficiency and capabilities of the proposed method.

Color-Decoupled Photo Response Non-Uniformity for Digital Image Forensics

The last few years have seen the use of photo response non-uniformity noise (PRNU), a unique fingerprint of imaging sensors, in various digital forensic applications such as source device identification, content integrity verification, and authentication. However, the use of a color filter array for capturing only one of the three color components per pixel introduces color interpolation noise, while the existing methods for extracting PRNU provide no effective means for addressing this issue. Because the artificial colors obtained through the color interpolation process are not directly acquired from the scene by physical hardware, we expect that the PRNU extracted from the physical components, which are free from interpolation noise, should be more reliable than that from the artificial channels, which carry interpolation noise. Based on this assumption we propose a couple-decoupled PRNU (CD-PRNU) extraction method, which first decomposes each color channel into four sub-images and then extracts the PRNU noise from each sub-image. The PRNU noise patterns of the sub-images are then assembled to get the CD-PRNU. This new method can prevent the interpolation noise from propagating into the physical components, thus improving the accuracy of device identification and image content integrity verification.

Time-Frequency and Time-Scale-Based Fragile Watermarking Methods for Image Authentication

Two fragile image watermarking methods are proposed for image authentication. The first method is based on time-frequency analysis and the second one is based on time-scale analysis. For the first method, the watermark is chosen as an arbitrary nonstationary signal with a particular signature in the time-frequency plane. Experimental results show that this technique is very sensitive to many attacks such as cropping, scaling, translation, JPEG compression, and rotation, making it very effective in image authentication. For the second method, based on a wavelet-domain multiresolution analysis, quantization index modulation (QIM) embedding scheme and arbitrary frequency-modulated (FM) chirp watermarks are used in the implementation. In this blind technique, the original watermark is needed neither for the content integrity verification of the original image nor for the content quality assessment of the distorted image.

Multiresolution fragile watermarking using complex chirp signals for content authentication

This paper proposes a wavelet-domain multiresolution fragile watermarking scheme using an improved quantization-index-modulation (QIM) embedding technique. A secure embedding zone is exploited in our proposed scheme to reduce the false detection rate of Kundur's scheme. The frequency modulated (FM) complex chirp signal is employed as watermark. Both the real and the imaginary parts of the chirp signal are embedded simultaneously in a hierarchical manner. Unlike the conventional schemes, the proposed scheme does not require the original watermark for content integrity verification and quality assessment for the distorted watermarked content. The blind authentication process allows embedding of arbitrary FM chirp watermarks.