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Reusable Intellectual property (IP) cores are increasingly being integrated in system-on-chips (SoCs) to reduce the SoC design complexity and satisfy the time to market constraint. However, globalization of design supply chain renders the IP cores such as digital signal processer (DSP) hardware accelerators vulnerable to piracy threat. Additionally, integrated circuits (ICs)/ IPs can be fraudulently claimed by a dishonest user. This letter presents a novel biometric fingerprint based hardware security approach using high level synthesis (HLS) framework to safeguard an IC/ IP against false ownership claim and piracy. The proposed approach embeds the IP vendor's biometric fingerprint into a hardware accelerator in the form of secret security constraints. Results show that the proposed approach outperforms a recent approach in terms of enhanced security.

This article discusses a joint encryption-then-compression-based watermarking scheme for copyright protection and content verification in variety of applications. In this scheme, redundant discrete wavelet transform is first performed to decompose the nonsubsampled contourlet transform host image, and then, the singular value decomposition is applied on transformed coefficients of the host image. Furthermore, same procedure is applied for both watermarks (image and PAN No.). The PAN number is encoded by the quick response (QR) code before hiding into the host image. Finally, 2D hyperchaotic encryption is used to encrypt the watermarked image to make our method more secure against attacks. After this, the encrypted image is then compressed via Huffman compression to reduce the size of the image at an acceptable quality of the reconstructed image. Furthermore, performance outcomes confirm better robustness and security of the method while preserving the image quality.

During the 1980s, many software developers and enthusiasts reacted to software's unclear status within the U.S. copyright law by pursuing technical, rather than legislative fixes. This paper applies forensic methods to recover records of conflict between commercial software developers and the enthusiasts who sought to “crack” commercial programs’ copy protection.

This paper presents a measurement setup for digital output buffers' characterization. This is of recognized importance for the integrated circuit industry and has rarely been addressed in the literature related to output buffer modeling. Currently, the model extraction is typically performed by simulating the transistor-level model of the device, which raises important issues regarding intellectual property protection, long-simulation times, and deembedding inaccuracies of the high-speed device mount parasitics. In the presented approach, a well-defined experimental procedure is proposed to extract and validate a state-of-the-art model for a commercial noninverting output buffer in a packaged format.

This article studies the challenges and opportunities of million-scale near-duplicate video retrieval using three well-known and potentially scalable methods. It concludes that although these approaches can perform efficiently they suffer from a significant performance drop because the efficient features are neither discriminative nor robust enough for versatile cases.

It can be observed that a rootkit may be used to conceal the digital rights management (DRM) software, which is aptly installed in consumers' computers to prevent unauthorized copying. In order to prevent unauthorized users from deleting the digital right management software by employing anti-rootkit tools to remove the rootkit, we develop a new driver-hidden rootkit to strengthen digital right management in this paper. The proposed driver-hidden rootkit is constructed using the technique of DKOM (Direct Kernel Object Manipulation), and have verified that it can successfully avoid a variety of well-known rootkit detectors. Our contributions are twofold. First, we can use the proposed new rootkit technology to extend the protection of the DRM software. Second, the stealth tricks of the proposed sophisticated driver-hidden rootkit can be a great inspiration to defenders who need to effectively strengthen the legitimate uses.

A multiscale scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) descriptor can help improve our ability to discriminate between images when using copy detection to identify illegal image copies.

Printer identification based on printed documents can provide forensic information to protect copyright and verify authenticity. In addition to intrinsic features (intrinsic signatures) of the printer, modulating the printing process to embed specific features (extrinsic signatures) will further extend the encoding capacity and decoding accuracy. One of the key issues with embedding extrinsic signatures is that the embedding should not degrade the image quality, but needs to be detectable by a detection algorithm. In this paper, we will demonstrate the feasibility of embedding code sequences in electrophotographic halftone images by modulating dot size through laser intensity modulation. We have developed corresponding embedding and detection algorithms to embed and extract information. Experimental results indicate that using a 600 dpi native resolution printer's default halftone algorithm, we can encode 5 bits of information in every 310 printer scan-lines or approximately every 0.5 inches.

A video copy detection system that is based on content fingerprinting and can be used for video indexing and copyright applications is proposed. The system relies on a fingerprint extraction algorithm followed by a fast approximate search algorithm. The fingerprint extraction algorithm extracts compact content-based signatures from special images constructed from the video. Each such image represents a short segment of the video and contains temporal as well as spatial information about the video segment. These images are denoted by temporally informative representative images. To find whether a query video (or a part of it) is copied from a video in a video database, the fingerprints of all the videos in the database are extracted and stored in advance. The search algorithm searches the stored fingerprints to find close enough matches for the fingerprints of the query video. The proposed fast approximate search algorithm facilitates the online application of the system to a large video database of tens of millions of fingerprints, so that a match (if it exists) is found in a few seconds. The proposed system is tested on a database of 200 videos in the presence of different types of distortions such as noise, changes in brightness/contrast, frame loss, shift, rotation, and time shift. It yields a high average true positive rate of 97.6% and a low average false positive rate of 1.0%. These results emphasize the robustness and discrimination properties of the proposed copy detection system. As security of a fingerprinting system is important for certain applications such as copyright protections, a secure version of the system is also presented.

Content-based video copy detection is very important for copyright protection in view of the growing popularity of video sharing websites, which deals with not only whether a copy occurs in a query video stream but also where the copy is located and where the copy is originated from. While a lot of work has addressed the problem with good performance, less effort has been made to consider the copy detection problem in the case of a continuous query stream, for which precise temporal localization and some complex video transformations like frame insertion and video editing need to be handled. We attempt to attack the problem by presenting a frame fusion based copy detection approach, which converts video copy detection to frame similarity search and frame fusion under a temporal consistency assumption. Our work focuses mainly on the frame fusion stage due to its critical role in copy detection performance. The proposed frame fusion scheme is based on a Viterbi-like algorithm, comprising an online back-tracking strategy with three relaxed constraints. The experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves high localization accuracy in both the query stream and the reference database even when a query video stream undergoes some complex transformations, while achieving comparable performance compared with state-of-the-art copy detection methods.

This paper presents a novel time-series linear search (TLS) method for detecting video copies. The method utilizes a sliding window to locate window sequences that are near-duplicates of a given query sequence. We address two issues of the conventional TLS method in order to strengthen its video copy detection capability. First, to accelerate the TLS process, we use a sequence-level signature as a compact representation of a video sequence based on the min-hash theory, and develop an efficient heap manipulation technique for fast generation of each window sequence's signature. Second, to improve the robustness of the TLS method, we use two techniques, namely, window length estimation and threshold transform, to resolve the containment relation problem caused by various types of video transformation and editing, such as frame cropping and speed change. The results of experiments on the MUSCLE-VCD-2007 dataset demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient and robust against different types of video transformation and editing.

Copyright protection is a key issue for video sharing over public networks. To protect the video content from unauthorized redistribution, digital fingerprinting is commonly used. To develop an efficient collusion-resistant fingerprinting scheme, it is very important for the system designer to understand how the behavior dynamics of colluders affect the performance of collusion attack. In the literature, little effort has been made to explicitly study the relationship between risk, e.g., the probability of the colluders to be detected, and the distortion of the colluded signal. In this paper, we investigate the risk-distortion relationship for the linear video collusion attack with Gaussian fingerprint. We formulate the optimal linear collusion attack as an optimization problem of finding the optimal collusion parameters to minimize the distortion subject to a risk constraint. By varying the risk constraint and solving the corresponding optimization problem, we can derive the optimal risk-distortion curve. Moreover, based upon the observation that the detector/attacker can each improve the detection/attack performance with the knowledge of his/her opponent's strategy, we formulate the attack and detection problem as a dynamic mouse and cat game and study the optimal strategies for both the attacker and detector. We show that if the detector uses a fixed detection strategy, the attacker can estimate the detector's strategy and choose the corresponding optimal strategy to attack the fingerprinted video with a small distortion. However, if the detector is powerful, i.e., the detector can always estimate the attacker's strategy, the best strategy for the attacker is the min-max strategy. Finally, we conduct several experiments to verify the proposed risk-distortion model using real video data.

In this age of increasingly complex, Internet-based technologies, it's very difficult to protect original works of authorship. This article examines the problem of copyright infringement and the copyright law's desire to balance the interests of creators with the interests of the public. The author also offers some insight in how to reduce the problem of copyright infringement.

Digital fingerprinting is a technique to deter unauthorized redistribution of multimedia content by embedding a unique identifying signal in each legally distributed copy. The embedded fingerprint can later be extracted and used to trace the originator of an unauthorized copy. A group of users may collude and attempt to create a version of the content that cannot be traced back to any of them. As multimedia data is commonly stored in compressed form, this paper addresses the problem of fingerprinting compressed signals. Analysis is carried out to show that due to the quantized nature of the host signal and the embedded fingerprint, directly extending traditional fingerprinting techniques for uncompressed signals to the compressed case leads to low collusion resistance. To overcome this problem and improve the collusion resistance, a new technique for fingerprinting compressed signals called Anti-Collusion Dither (ACD) is proposed, whereby a random dither signal is added to the compressed host before embedding so as to make the effective host signal appear more continuous. The proposed technique is shown to reduce the accuracy with which attackers can estimate the host signal, and from an information theoretic perspective, the proposed ACD technique increases the maximum number of users that can be supported by the fingerprinting system under a given attack. Both analytical and experimental studies confirm that the proposed technique increases the probability of identifying a guilty user and can approximately quadruple the collusion resistance compared to conventional Gaussian fingerprinting.

This paper presents a novel dual watermarking mechanism for digital media that embeds a recognizable pattern into the spatial domain and an invisible logo into the frequency domain. Undoubtedly, visible watermarking is important for protecting online resources from unauthorized reproduction. Due to the visibility of embedded patterns, however, watermarked digital media are vulnerable to the inpainting attack and common signal processing operations. Utilizing hybrid strategies, simulation results show that the novel method can resist these attacks. In particular, the new mechanism allows legal subscribers to restore an unmarked image, whereas other dual watermarking schemes do not. This feature makes it suitable for protecting artistic and valuable media.

Much of what modern digital rights management (DRM) systems attempt to accomplish was actually forcefully implemented on videogame consoles beginning with the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and SEGA Genesis system in the early 1980s. Examining the links between modern DRM mechanisms and these early production and copy protection systems can help contextualize the future of media production and access.

Technologies that aim to protect digital content have fallen short of their mission. The computing community must find ways to make protection schemes interoperable and adopt a use model that lifts restrictions on paid-for protected content.

Because the DAC profile was designed to be a superset of the other known rights information standards, there should be no problem in representing the four rights information standards with the DAC profile. However, due to different expressiveness coverage of the other rights information standards, the reverse directional interoperability between the DAC profile and the other standards seems problematic. Moreover, the interoperability between the other rights information standards except for the DAC profile seems to be even more difficult to achieve in spite of potential needs from the digital home environment. Therefore, further study is required to support the possible bidirectional interoperability between the existing rights information standards as well as reverse directional interoperability between the DAC profile and other rights information standards.

For pt. 1 see ibid., vol.11, no.2, p.50-56, (2008). This paper provides an explanation of a distributed measurement system based on proprietary software. It describes applications based mainly on free and open source software (FOSS). It is an interesting alternative to proprietary solutions as it offers greater flexibility in software development, better protection of customers' rights, and guaranteed open access to data. FOSS is based on the IEEE standards 1003, also known as POSIX or ISO/IEC 9945. In this paper, it is shown that the same objectives met with proprietary solutions can be achieved with FOSS, if not even better than with proprietary software.

An effective video copy detection framework should be robust against spatial and temporal variations, e.g., changes in brightness and speed. To this end, a content-based approach for video copy detection is proposed. We define the problem as a partial matching problem in a probabilistic model and transform it into a shortest-path problem in a matching graph. To reduce the computation costs of the proposed framework, we introduce some methods that rapidly select key frames and candidate segments from a large amount of video data. The experiment results show that the proposed approach not only handles spatial and temporal variations well, but it also reduces the computation costs substantially.

Billions of dollars allegedly lost to piracy of multimedia have recently triggered the industry to rethink the way music and movies are distributed. As encryption is vulnerable to rerecording, currently all copyright protection mechanisms tend to rely on watermarking. A watermark is an imperceptive secret hidden in a host signal. In this paper, we analyze the security of multimedia copyright protection systems that use watermarks by proposing a new breed of attacks on generic watermarking systems. A typical replacement attack relies upon the observation that multimedia content is often highly repetitive. Thus, the attack procedure replaces each signal block with another, perceptually similar block computed as a combination of other similar blocks found either within the same media clip or within a library of media clips. Assuming the blocks used to compute the replacement are marked with distinct secrets, we show that if the computed replacement block is at some minimal distance from the original marked block, a large portion of the embedded watermark is removed. We describe the logistics of the attack and an exemplary implementation against a spread-spectrum data hiding technology for audio signals.

This paper discusses the digital millennium copyright act (DMCA), which gives copyright holders new rights to control the way people use copyrighted material and new protection for technologies designed to restrict access or copying. The movie and record companies argued they needed these new restrictions to fight increased piracy threats in the digital era. U.S. entertainment companies are pushing for another wave of even more restrictive legislation. "Broadcast flag" legislation could require that all consumer electronics devices recognize protected television broadcasts and potentially refuse to copy them; a so-called "radio flag" bill would prevent or restrict the manufacture of hard disk recorders for digital radio; and an "analog hole" closure would restrict the connections new digital devices can make with analog devices. As the entertainment industry expands copyright law, the rising tide threatens to completely wash away many type of innovative gadgets

DRM is a technique for preventing an illegal use of digital contents such as streaming media. ISMA 1.0 is a standard for implementing MPEG-4 streaming media in the Internet, while ISMACryp 1.0 adds cryptographic mechanisms for enabling DRM to the ISMA standard. Since ISMACryp 1.0 satisfies requirements for Internet streaming and copyright protection, it is appropriate for playing DRM-enabled digital contents on the Internet. The digital contents to which ISMACryp 1.0 is applied can be replayed both in the IP set-top box and personal computer. The IP set-top box is a device that is subsidiary to television for various broadcasting services, and is expected as an essential element in a home networking environments. Nowadays, it is a trend to make the IP set-top box as a multi purpose device that is vary similar to personal computer. We could also prospect that the IP set-top box replaces the personal computer as a major client system for streaming services. We design and implement the secure DRM client system for playing ISMACryp-enabled digital contents. Especially, we develop the lightweight SecureDB and SecureDB Daemon for protecting sensitive information such as cryptographic keys. We also apply them to the commercialized embedded Linux IP set-top box for enabling the secure contents distribution system.

Digital rights management broadly refers to a set of policies, techniques and tools that guide the proper use of digital content. A DRM plays important roles in several processes that are involved in the flow of content. The major functionalities of this DRM system are: packaging of the raw content for easy distribution and tracking, content protection for tamper-proof transmission, delivery of content offline on CDs and DVDs and delivering content on-demand over peer-to-peer networks. Thus a set of standards related to various aspects of DRM are practiced in order to ensure fairness, interoperability and also for the consumer confidence.

This tutorial paper reviews the theory and design of codes for hiding or embedding information in signals such as images, video, audio, graphics,and text. Such codes have also been called watermarking codes; they can be used in a variety of applications, including copyright protection for digital media, content authentication, media forensics, data binding, and covert communications. Some of these applications imply the presence of an adversary attempting to disrupt the transmission of information to the receiver; other applications involve a noisy, generally unknown, communication channel. Our focus is on the mathematical models, fundamental principles, and code design techniques that are applicable to data hiding. The approach draws from basic concepts in information theory, coding theory, game theory, and signal processing,and is illustrated with applications to the problem of hiding data in images.

For decades, we've grown accustomed to the idea that electronic equipment gets increasingly powerful and economical with time each year, we buy more capability for the same price. Soon, however, there might be an exception. A new US Federal Communications (FCC) rule (FCC report 03-273) states that all US TV recorders made after July 2005 must recognize and obey a signal or marker in programs: the broadcast flag, that will restrict users from copying or distributing digital content. The "flag" is actually an instruction to the copying device, and although the FCC has suggested that deserving groups (such as those building systems to help the blind) might get exemptions, devices for the consumer market will have to obey it. Consequently, we could see consumers rush to buy high-definition digital TV recorders before the rule goes into effect this summer (2005).

Discusses the ethical, legal, economic, and academic implications of plagiarism with a special emplhasis on the ramifications for IEEE Proceedings and other IEEE publications. Reports on rules the IEEE imposes on authors and identifies the steps the IEEE is taking to ensure copyright protection of intellectual property.

For the purpose of deterring unauthorized duplication and distribution of multimedia contents, a seller may insert a unique digital watermark into each copy of the multimedia contents to be sold. When an illegal replica is found in the market sometime later, the seller can determine the responsible distributor by examining the watermark embedded. However, the accusation against the charged distributor, who was the buyer in some earlier transaction, is objectionable because the seller also has access to the watermarked copies and, hence, is able to release such a replica on her own. In this paper, a watermarking protocol is proposed to avoid such difficulties, known as the customer's right problem, in the phase of arbitration. The proposed watermarking protocol also provides a fix to Memon and Wong's scheme by solving the unbinding problem. In addition, the buyer is no longer required to contact the watermark certification authority during transactions, and the anonymity of the buyer can be retained through a trusted third party. The result is an efficient and anonymous buyer-seller watermarking protocol.

There are a number of compression algorithms available today for compressing music files by 90 per cent or more so that the data can be more economically transmitted over a network such as the Internet and stored on a computer or music player. For the algorithms, the basic tradeoff is between sound quality and how much they can compress the music files. However, there are other important considerations including the extent to which the full-fidelity, uncompressed files can be recreated from the compressed files, how copy protection is implemented, and how secure the downloaded files are from unauthorized distribution. While MP3 is still considered as the undisputed leader in this field, none of the current formats has all the characteristics necessary to dominate the market. None combines both lossless transmission and storage with the built-in ability to adapt to a variety of playback hardware. Nevertheless, regardless of which specific flavor of compression ultimately wins, there is no question that compression will change the way we collect and listen to music.

We discuss the issues related to image watermarking benchmarking and scenarios based on digital rights management requirements. We show that improvements are needed in image quality evaluation, especially related to image geometrical deformation assessments, in risk evaluation related to specific delivery scenarios and in multidimensional criteria evaluation. Efficient benchmarking is still an open issue and we suggest the use of open-source Web-based evaluation systems for collective progress in this domain.

This paper provides a tutorial and survey of digital fingerprinting and video scrambling algorithms based on partial encryption. Necessary design tradeoffs for algorithm development are highlighted for multicast communication environments. We also propose a novel architecture for joint fingerprinting and decryption that holds promise for a better compromise between practicality and security for emerging digital rights management applications.

We address whether putting a pop-up advertising window as a layer on top of a Web page's screen display involves the unlawful preparation of a derivative work without the consent of the owner. Copyright Act [17 U.S.C. sec. 106(2)] makes it copyright infringement to prepare a derivative work without the authorization of the copyright holder who owns the underlying work. Something special about this provision of copyright law is that, unlike those provisions dealing with unauthorized reproduction and distribution, this provision prohibits the preparation of derivative works, rather than the manufacture or distribution of copies of the derivative works. A copy is a physical object embodying a work in fixed form, for example, a book, painting, audiotape, programmed EPROM, or encoded hard disk.

With increasing use of the Internet as a content-distribution platform, mere interoperability of the codec is no longer sufficient if content owners are not prepared to distribute their content online for fear of piracy. Therefore, one also needs interoperability in the area of managing and protecting related intellectual property rights. To provide interoperability of digital rights management (DRM) systems to protect the content rather than the distribution channel, MPEG has embarked on developing intellectual property management and protection (IPMP) specifications targeted at the content itself that are natively built into its standards. It is the hope that such standards will allow for interoperability of content commerce systems, giving consumers more choice, while providing rights holders with the tools to effectively protect their assets and to develop complex and attractive business offering to tempt consumers. While it remains uncertain whether standardization is in fact the right vehicle to provide the e-content market with an impetus to grow, it appears that MPEG is working on a set of specifications with relatively good chances of helping to achieve this goal.

We have designed an automatic song identification component of a digital rights management (DRM) system for music, called MusicDNA. The details of MusicDNA are presented and the process by which we arrived at the final system configuration is outlined. This paper documents our experiences so that it can serve as a reference to those seeking to build a complete DRM system for music.

This article describes the rationale supporting and design of a copy protection system called SmartRight. While carefully presenting our motivations, some light is shed on the very peculiar problems raised by the enforcement of copy protection. Hence, this article also explores less technical but highly important issues such as the legal and commercial aspects.

This paper presents a novel robust watermarking approach called FuseMark based on the principles of image fusion for copy protection or robust tagging applications. We consider the problem of logo watermarking in still images and employ multiresolution data fusion principles for watermark embedding and extraction. A human visual system model based on contrast sensitivity is incorporated to hide a higher energy hidden logo in salient image components. Watermark extraction involves both characterization of attacks and logo estimation using a rake-like receiver. Statistical analysis demonstrates how our extraction approach can be used for watermark detection applications to decrease the problem of false negative detection without increasing the false positive detection rate. Simulation results verify theoretical observations and demonstrate the practical performance of FuseMark.

This paper describes a novel removable medium based on the hard disk drive (called "information versatile disk for removable usage" (iVDR/spl trade/)) and interface architecture for copyright protection based on public key infrastructure and superdistribution. This interface architecture is applicable to various media including iVDRs whose interfaces are AT-attachment based.

Many problems in science and technology are modeled by ill-posed operators and the main difficulty in obtaining accurate solutions is caused by the high instability of such operators. The paper introduces a new schema for secure image authentication. It is based on a rather unconventional approach - the extremely high sensitivity of ill-posed operators to any change in the input data is turned into a tool to achieve fragile watermarking for secure image verification. The ill-posed operator of concern is based on a highly ill-conditioned matrix interrelating the watermark and the original image. Authentication is achieved by solving the least squares problem associated with the underlying linear operator. Regarding general requirements for secure watermark-based authentication, analytical and practical aspects of the introduced technique are discussed. It is shown that the proposed authentication schema is highly secure while providing excellent tamper localization. Several experiments were conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique when it is subjected to different attacks, including vector quantization counterfeiting and cropping.

The paper presents a novel watermarking scheme able to resist geometric attacks. The proposed method performs imperceptible watermarking of images in the spatial domain. To generate resistance to scaling and rotation attacks, two generalized Radon transformations of the image are introduced, while resistance to translation is accomplished through a localization of the watermarking method based on feature points of the image. The original image is not required for the detection process. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed scheme is able to withstand a variety of attacks including common geometric attacks.

Super-audio compact disc (SACD), conceived and developed by Philips and Sony, is viewed as the successor of the standard CD. In March 1999 the standard was set, and Scarlet Book version 1.0 was released. Since then, the format changed from an audiophile release format to a mass-consumer format. Not only does SACD provide an enhanced listening performance to the end-user, it also provides strong copy protection for the music industry. These aspects, in combination with a basic introduction in signal processing for super audio, are discussed The article is concluded with an overview of some of the latest developments in high-quality DSD generation.

The possibility of one DVD spawning countless perfect digital copies is, for the movie industry, the scenario for the ultimate horror show. Following the breaking of the content scramble encryption system for DVDs by a 16-year-old Norwegian programmer, Jon Johanssen, and the following lawsuit (decided in favour of the movie industry), several approaches for preventing the copying of DVDs are being considered. Some of these mechanisms block copies from being made in the first place, others stop the playback of copies after the fact. The techniques are outlined in this article.

Digital watermarking is an emerging technique to protect data security and intellectual property right. Identification or verification of watermarking patterns can be achieved by detecting watermarks in received signals. However, one of the biggest challenges in watermarking detection is that the strengths of the watermark signals will change after being distorted by an attacker in a watermarking channel. Meanwhile, the embedding strengths may be adapted to the original signals, which are unknown at the receiver end. Further, the original signals are often highly non-Gaussian. Although some work has been done on optimum detection of watermarks, the uncertainty of watermark signal strengths and real statistical behavior of multimedia contents have not been taken into account simultaneously. Much more study is needed to enhance the performance of watermarking systems. Since multiplicative watermarks are robust and well suited for copyright protection, this paper presents our investigation on robust optimum detection of multiplicative watermarks. For sub-band transformed domains such as the discrete cosine transform (DCT), discrete wavelet transform (DWT), and pyramid transform, a class of generalized correlators is constructed based on the generalized Gaussian distributions. Thresholding methods to achieve a given false alarm rate, and the performance analyses are provided. The square-root detector is designed and demonstrated to have near optimal performance for a large set of natural images and can be employed as a "universally optimal" detector or decoder for images and video. The locally most powerful detection method is then extended to DFT domain multiplicative watermarking, with the magnitudes of coefficients modeled by the Weibull distributions. Another class of detectors is built based on this statistical modeling. The robust optimum detection of multiplicative watermarks can be applied to copyright notification, enforcement, and broadcast monitoring. We have applied the robust optimum watermarking detection to combined audio and video watermarking.

Billions of dollars allegedly lost to piracy of multimedia content have triggered the industry to rethink the way music and films are distributed on the Internet. As encryption is vulnerable to digital or analog re-recording, currently almost all copyright protection mechanisms rely to a certain extent on watermarking. A watermark is an imperceptive secret hidden into a host signal. We analyze the security of multimedia copyright protection systems that use watermarks by proposing a new breed of attacks on generic watermarking systems. A typical blind pattern matching attack relies on the observation that multimedia content is often highly repetitive. Thus, the attack procedure identifies subsets of signal blocks that are similar and permutes these blocks. Assuming the permuted blocks are marked with distinct secrets, it can be shown that any watermark detector is facing a task of exponential complexity to reverse the permutations as a preprocessing step for watermark detection. We describe the logistics of the attack and an implementation against a spread-spectrum and a quantization index modulation data hiding technology for audio signals.

This paper presents a novel method to blindly estimate the quality of a multimedia communication link by means of an unconventional use of digital fragile watermarking. Data hiding by digital watermarking is usually employed for multimedia copyright protection, authenticity verification, or similar purposes. However, watermarking is here adopted as a technique to provide a blind measure of the quality of service in multimedia communications. Specifically, a fragile watermark is hidden in an MPEG-like host data video transport stream using a spread-spectrum approach. Like a tracing signal, the watermark tracks the data, where it is embedded, since both the watermark and the host data follow the same communication link. The estimation of the tracing watermark allows dynamically evaluating the effective quality of the provided video services. This depends on the whole physical layer, including the employed video co/decoder. The performed method is based on the evaluation of the mean-square-error between the estimated and the actual watermarks. The proposed technique has been designed for application to wireless multimedia communication systems. According to the results obtained, the sensitivity of the detected tracing watermark on the quality of service (QoS) indices provides for some useful capabilities for analyzing future mobile Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) services.

Watermarking has become a technology of choice for a broad range of multimedia copyright protection applications. Watermarks have also been used to embed format-independent metadata in audio/video signals in a way that is robust to common editing. In this paper, we present several novel mechanisms for effective encoding and detection of direct-sequence spread-spectrum watermarks in audio signals. The developed techniques aim at (i) improving detection convergence and robustness, (ii) improving watermark imperceptiveness, (iii) preventing desynchronization attacks, (iv) alleviating estimation/removal attacks, and finally, (v) establishing covert communication over a public audio channel. We explore the security implications of the developed mechanisms and review watermark robustness on a benchmark suite that includes a combination of audio processing primitives including: time- and frequency-scaling with wow-and-flutter, additive and multiplicative noise, resampling, requantization, noise reduction, and filtering.

The paper presents a model for watermarking and some attacks on watermarks. Given the watermarked signal, the so-called Wiener attack performs minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) estimation of the watermark and subtracts the weighted MMSE estimate from the watermarked signal. Under the assumption of a fixed correlation detector, the attack is shown to minimize the expected correlation statistic for the same attack distortion among linear, shift-invariant filtering attacks. It also leads to the idea of energy-efficient watermarking: watermarking that resists MMSE estimation as much as possible, and provides a meaningful way to evaluate robustness. The paper shows that energy-efficient watermarks must satisfy a power-spectrum condition (PSC), which states that the watermark's power spectrum should be directly proportional to the original signal's. PSC-compliant watermarks are proven to be most robust. Experiments with signal models and natural images demonstrate that watermarks that do not closely fulfill the PSC are vulnerable to the Wiener attack, while PSC-compliant watermarks are highly resistant to it. These theoretical and experimental results justify prior heuristic arguments that, for maximum robustness, a watermark should be closely matched to the spectral content of the original signal. The results also discourage the use of watermarks that do not approximately satisfy the PSC.

The dangers of current and proposed legislation to our freedom to research, develop, and publish about digital media technologies requires a fundamental shift in our research focus. We need to invent technologies that aren't designed to protect copyright in a way that makes the exercise of fair use rights impossible-for private, noncommercial purposes; educational and research purposes; and, in certain cases, public and commercial purposes. To navigate the potential minefield of copyright and fair use for digital media, I discuss three areas that help shape our discourse and practice-law and policy, technology, and media use.

We need a robust method to assure secure storage, retrieval, and transmission of such digital data, especially for mobile devices. This has become more apparent after hearing the high-profile story of Napster. This new type of music delivery service brought up issues of how to protect copyrighted data, particularly in the new generation of peer-to-peer distribution schemes. Furthermore, the rapid penetration of mobile phones worldwide suggests that downloading copyrighted data onto these portable devices is possible around the clock at any place. I primarily focus on the copyright management of Secure MultiMediaCards (SecureMMCs) to handle users' access to digital copyrighted data in a unique scheme called Super Distribution. Using SecureMMCs, Super Distribution technology can build legitimate peer-to-peer systems where copyrighted data are freely copied and exchanged, but users must obtain the right to use the data. Users may then be charged to reimburse the copyright holders. I also discuss Keltaide-Music, a mobile phone music distribution service using SecureMMCs.

Several fragile watermarking schemes presented in the literature are either vulnerable to vector quantization (VQ) counterfeiting attacks or sacrifice localization accuracy to improve security. Using a hierarchical structure, we propose a method that thwarts the VQ attack while sustaining the superior localization properties of blockwise independent watermarking methods. In particular, we propose dividing the image into blocks in a multilevel hierarchy and calculating block signatures in this hierarchy. While signatures of small blocks on the lowest level of the hierarchy ensure superior accuracy of tamper localization, higher level block signatures provide increasing resistance to VQ attacks. At the top level, a signature calculated using the whole image completely thwarts the counterfeiting attack. Moreover, "sliding window" searches through the hierarchy enable the verification of untampered regions after an image has been cropped. We provide experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Digital watermarking has been proposed as a solution to the problem of copyright protection of multimedia documents in networked environments. There are two important issues that watermarking algorithms need to address. First, watermarking schemes are required to provide trustworthy evidence for protecting rightful ownership. Second, good watermarking schemes should satisfy the requirement of robustness and resist distortions due to common image manipulations (such as filtering, compression, etc.). In this paper, we propose a novel watermarking algorithm based on singular value decomposition (SVD). Analysis and experimental results show that the new watermarking method performs well in both security and robustness.