KEYWORDS: Biometrics, Digital watermarking, Computer security, Binary data, Image processing, Data storage, Digital imaging, Picture Archiving and Communication System, Information security, Plutonium
This paper reviews the ICAO security architecture for biometric passports. An attack enabling RFID identity theft for a later misuse is presented. Specific countermeasures against this attack are described. Furthermore, it is shown that robust high capacity digital watermarking for the embedding and retrieving of binary digital signature data can be applied as an effective mean against RFID identity theft. This approach requires only minimal modifications of the passport manufacturing process and is an enhancement of already proposed solutions. The approach may also be applied in combination with a RFID as a backup solution (damaged RFID chip) to verify with asymmetric cryptographic techniques the authenticity and the integrity of the passport data.
This paper presents a new approach for the protection of travel documents. We propose a digital watermarking technique which requires for the verification process a low scanning resolution of at least 72 DPI. The approach is based on the wavelet decomposition and supports three key aspects: Message encoding is accomplished by iterative error correction codes satisfying a nearly optimal channel capacity. This encoding is based on specific modulation that requires for the implementation a significant lower complexity as the often applied M-array modulation. The watermark embedding is applied in the wavelet domain based on stochastic driven perceptional criteria for a good quality and invisibility. The watermarking process is considered as a communication process with side information. The approach utilizes two different watermarks, one for the channel state information estimation and one for the informative watermark which carries as a payload the hidden information.
This paper presents a new approach, called smartID, for the protection of travel documents. We introduce a specific signature format exploiting as much as possible the given modulus size for generating a digital signature with a partial message recovery feature. This specific formatted digital signature enables a very efficient representation of the authenticity information of the travel document. It is show that the complete whole content of a travel document page, i.e. the image information and the text information, can be securely stored with a RSA modulus size of up to 6144 bits in a single PDF417 2D barcode which is quite limited in its total capacity. The approach supports the Kerckhoff principle, the authenticity of the data, and the authenticity of the issuing authority that generated the data. The approach neither depends on a specific data carrier nor on the specific cryptographic public key system.
Novel functional possibilities, provided by recent data hiding technologies, carry out the danger of uncontrolled (unauthorized) and unlimited information exchange that might be used by people with unfriendly interests. The multimedia industry as well as the research community recognize the urgent necessity for network security and copyright protection, or rather the lack of adequate law for digital multimedia protection. This paper advocates the need for detecting hidden data in digital and analog media as well as in electronic transmissions, and for attempting to identify the underlying hidden data. Solving this problem calls for the development of an architecture for blind stochastic hidden data detection in order to prevent unauthorized data exchange. The proposed architecture is called StegoWall; its key aspects are the solid investigation, the deep understanding, and the prediction of possible tendencies in the development of advanced data hiding technologies. The basic idea of our complex approach is to exploit all information about hidden data statistics to perform its detection based on a stochastic framework. The StegoWall system will be used for four main applications: robust watermarking, secret communications, integrity control and tamper proofing, and internet/network security.
This paper presents a new attack, called the watermark template attach, for watermarked images. In contrast to the Stirmark benchmark, this attack does not severely reduce the quality of the image. This attack maintains, therefore, the commercial value of the watermarked image. In contrast to previous approaches, it is not the aim of the attack to change the statistics of embedded watermarks fooling the detection process but to utilize specific concepts that have been recently developed for more robust watermarking schemes. The attack estimates the corresponding template points in the FFT domain and then removes them using local interpolation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the attack showing different test cases that have been watermarked with commercial available watermark products. The approach presented is not limited to the FFT domain. Other transformation domains may be also exploited by very similar variants of the described attack.
KEYWORDS: Digital watermarking, Image processing, Parallel processing, Signal processing, Signal detection, Information security, Data communications, Algorithm development, Visualization, Image resolution
Large and high-resolution images usually have a high commercial value. Thus they are very good candidates for watermarking. If many images have to be signed in a Client-Server setup, memory and computational requirements could become unrealistic for current and near future solutions. In this paper, we propose to tile the image into sub-images. The watermarking scheme is then applied to each sub-image in the embedding and retrieval process. Thanks to this solution, the first possible optimization consists in creating different threads to read and write the image tile by tile. The time spent in input/output operations, which can be a bottleneck for large images, is reduced. In addition to this optimization, we show that the memory consumption of the application is also highly reduced for large images. Finally, the application can be multithreaded so that different tiles can be watermarked in parallel. Therefore the scheme can take advantage of the processing power of the different processors available in current servers. We show that the correct tile size and the right amount of threads have to be created to efficiently distribute the workload. Eventually, security, robustness and invisibility issues are addressed considering the signal redundancy.
KEYWORDS: Digital watermarking, Visualization, Image processing, Digital imaging, System identification, Multimedia, Image acquisition, CRTs, Spatial resolution, Detection and tracking algorithms
This paper presents a new approach for the secure integrity verification of driver licenses, passports or other analogue identification documents. The system embeds (detects) the reference number of the identification document with the DCT watermark technology in (from) the owner photo of the identification document holder. During verification the reference number is extracted and compared with the reference number printed in the identification document. The approach combines optical and digital image processing techniques. The detection system must be able to scan an analogue driver license or passport, convert the image of this document into a digital representation and then apply the watermark verification algorithm to check the payload of the embedded watermark. If the payload of the watermark is identical with the printed visual reference number of the issuer, the verification was successful and the passport or driver license has not been modified. This approach constitutes a new class of application for the watermark technology, which was originally targeted for the copyright protection of digital multimedia data. The presented approach substantially increases the security of the analogue identification documents applied in many European countries.
Research in digital watermarking has progressed along two paths. While new watermarking technologies are being developed, some researchers are also investigating different ways of attacking digital watermarks. Common attacks to watermarks usually aim to destroy the embedded watermark or to impair its detection. In this paper we propose a conceptually new attack for digitally watermarked images. The proposed attack does not destroy an embedded watermark, but copies it from one image to a different image. Although this new attack does not destroy a watermark or impair its detection, it creates new challenges, especially when watermarks are used for copyright protection and identification. The process of copying the watermark requires neither algorithmic knowledge of the watermarking technology nor the watermarking key. The attack is based on an estimation of the embedded watermark in the spatial domain through a filtering process. The estimate of the watermark is then adapted and inserted into the target image. To illustrate the performance of the proposed attack we applied it to commercial and non-commercial watermarking schemes. The experiments showed that the attack is very effective in copying a watermark from one image to a different image. In addition, we have a closer look at application dependent implications of this new attack.
Digital image watermarking has become a popular technique for authentication and copyright protection. For verifying the security and robustness of watermarking algorithms, specific attacks have to be applied to test them. In contrast to the known Stirmark attack, which degrades the quality of the image while destroying the watermark, this paper presents a new approach which is based on the estimation of a watermark and the exploitation of the properties of Human Visual System (HVS). The new attack satisfies two important requirements. First, image quality after the attack as perceived by the HVS is not worse than the quality of the stego image. Secondly, the attack uses all available prior information about the watermark and cover image statistics to perform the best watermark removal or damage. The proposed attack is based on a stochastic formulation of the watermark removal problem, considering the embedded watermark as additive noise with some probability distribution. The attack scheme consists of two main stages: (1) watermark estimation and partial removal by a filtering based on a Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) approach; (2) watermark alteration and hiding through addition of noise to the filtered image, taking into account the statistics of the embedded watermark and exploiting HVS characteristics. Experiments on a number of real world and computer generated images show the high efficiency of the proposed attack against known academic and commercial methods: the watermark is completely destroyed in all tested images without altering the image quality. The approach can be used against watermark embedding schemes that operate either in coordinate domain, or transform domains like Fourier, DCT or wavelet.
KEYWORDS: Digital watermarking, Multimedia, Current controlled current source, Legal, Computer security, Image processing, Digital image processing, Digital imaging, Information security
This paper presents a new approach for the copyright protection of digital multimedia data. The system applies cryptographic protocols and a public key technique for different purposes, namely encoding/decoding a digital watermark generated by any spread spectrum technique and the secure transfer of watermarked data from the sender to the receiver in a commercial business process. The public key technique is applied for the construction of a one-way watermark embedding and verification function to identify and prove the uniqueness of the watermark. In addition, our approach provides secure owner authentication data who has initiated the watermark process for a specific data set. Legal dispute resolution is supported for multiple watermarking of digital data without revealing the confidential keying information.
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