Verifiable image revision from chameleon hashes

• Published in: Cybersecurity (Singapore) 2021-10, Vol.4 (1), p.1-13, Article 34
• Main Authors: Xu, Junpeng, Chen, Haixia, Yang, Xu, Wu, Wei, Song, Yongcheng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Applied Cryptography in Computer and Communications; Authentication; Chameleon hashes; Computer Science; Cryptography; Digital imaging; Digital signatures; Image authentication; Image manipulation; Privacy; Privacy protection; Security
• ISSN: 2523-3246; 2523-3246
• DOI: 10.1186/s42400-021-00097-3

In a digital society, the rapid development of computer science and the Internet has greatly facilitated image applications. However, one of the public network also brings risks to both image tampering and privacy exposure. Image authentication is the most important approaches to verify image integrity and authenticity. However, it has been challenging for image authentication to address both issues of tampering detection and privacy protection. One aspect, image authentication requires image contents not be changed to detect tampering. The other, privacy protection needs to remove sensitive information from images, and as a result, the contents should be changed. In this paper, we propose a practical image authentication scheme constructed from chameleon hashes combined with ordinary digital signatures to make tradeoff between tampering detection and privacy protection. Our scheme allows legitimate users to modify contents of authenticated images with a privacy-aware purpose (for example, cover some sensitive areas with mosaics) according to specific rules and verify the authenticity without interaction with the original authenticator. The security of our scheme is guaranteed by the security of the underlying cryptographic primitives. Experiment results show that our scheme is efficient and practical. We believe that our work will facilitate image applications where both authentication and privacy protection are desirable.