Dual watermarking framework for privacy protection and content authentication of multimedia

• Published in: Future generation computer systems 2019-05, Vol.94, p.654-673
• Main Authors: Hurrah, Nasir N., Parah, Shabir A., Loan, Nazir A., Sheikh, Javaid A., Elhoseny, Mohammad, Muhammad, Khan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Content authentication; Copyright protection; Cyber-attack; Cybersecurity; Multimedia security; Robustness
• ISSN: 0167-739X; 1872-7115
• DOI: 10.1016/j.future.2018.12.036

In the current multimedia networked infrastructure, privacy breaches due to cyber-attacks result in huge economic losses. Despite these threats there is ever increasing demand to share data over various insecure networks for accomplishment of numerous tasks. In such a scenario there is a greater need to develop new algorithms for strengthening the existing cybersecurity frameworks, ensure security, privacy, copyright protection and authentication of data. In this paper a new technique for copyright protection, data security and content authentication of multimedia images is presented. The copyright protection of the media is taken care of by embedding a robust watermark using an efficient inter-block coefficient differencing algorithm and is proposed as Scheme I. Scheme II has been utilized to ensure both copyright protection, and content authentication. The authentication of the content has been ensured by embedding a fragile watermark in spatial domain while as copyright protection has been taken care of utilizing a robust watermark. In order to thwart an adversary and ensure that it has no access to actual embedded data, we make use of a novel encryption algorithm in conjunction with Arnold transform to encrypt data prior to its embedding. The experimental results reveal that the proposed framework offers high degree of robustness against single/dual/triple attacks; with Normalized Correlation (NCC), more than or equal to 0.95. Besides, the fragile watermark embedding makes the system capable of tamper detection and localization with average BER more than 45% for all signal processing/geometric attacks. The average PSNR achieved for both schemes is greater than 41 dB. A comparison of the proposed framework with various state-of-the-art techniques demonstrate its effectiveness and superiority. •Dual watermarking based system for privacy protection and content authentication of multimedia.•High robustness, offering threat identification and localization.•Preservation of stego image’s quality via strong coefficient correlation between two selected neighborhood blocks.•Highly robust to both singular and hybrid attacks.