Search

Video forensics is one of the hot topics in multimedia forensics. Nowadays, spreading fake videos across the internet is becoming a profession mainly in politics and entertainment. In this study, a novel two‐stage inter‐frame video forgery detection technique is proposed. The first stage analyses spatio‐temporal feature flow consistency to detect suspicious tamper points. Identifying the type of forgery and validating the recovered video are done in the second stage. Earth mover's distance is used as a similarity metric in both stages. The authors concentrate on a robust inter‐frame forgery detection approach which can be applied for any challenging video. Compression at a higher rate, noise addition, and filtering are the anti‐forensic tricks used by forgers to fool forensic techniques. However, most of the literature in video forgery detection has handled these issues as post‐processing attacks and reported lesser accuracies for it. Hence the authors propose a robust and efficient forgery detection technique capable of identifying all kinds of inter‐frame forgeries in videos. Experimental evaluation of the public video data set shows that the proposed approach outperforms existing approaches with an improved rate of robustness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late in 2005, Sony BMG released millions of Compact Discs containing digital rights management technologies that threatened the security of its customers' computers and the integrity of the information infrastructure more broadly. This Article aims to identify the market, technological, and legal factors that appear to have led a presumably rational actor toward a strategy that in retrospect appears obviously and fundamentally misguided.The Article first addresses the market-based rationales that likely influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems and reveals that even the most charitable interpretation of Sony BMG's internal strategizing demonstrates a failure to adequately value security and privacy. After taking stock of the then-existing technological environment that both encouraged and enabled the distribution of these protection measures, the Article examines law, the third vector of influence on Sony BMG's decision to release flawed protection measures into the wild, and argues that existing doctrine in the fields of contract, intellectual property, and consumer protection law fails to adequately counter the technological and market forces that allowed a self-interested actor to inflict these harms on the public.The Article concludes with two recommendations aimed at reducing the likelihood of companies deploying protection measures with known security vulnerabilities in the consumer marketplace. First, Congress should alter the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by creating permanent exemptions from its anti-circumvention and antitrafficking provisions that enable security research and the dissemination of tools to remove harmful protection measures. Second, the Federal Trade Commission should leverage insights from the field of human computer interaction security (HCI-Sec) to develop a stronger framework for user control over the security and privacy aspects of computers.

Image forgery detection and localisation is one of the principal problems in digital forensics. Copy–paste forgery in digital images is a type of forgery in which an image region is copied and pasted at another location within the same image. In this work, the authors propose a methodology to detect and localise copy‐pasted regions in images based on scale‐invariant feature transform (SIFT). Existing copy‐paste forgery detection in images using SIFT and clustering techniques such as hierarchical agglomerative and density‐based spatial clustering of applications with noise resulted many false pixel detections. They have introduced sensitivity‐based clustering along with SIFT features to identify copy–pasted pixels and disregard the false pixels. Experimental evaluation on public image datasets MICC‐F220, MICC‐F2000 and MICC‐F8 multi shows that the proposed method is showing improved performance in detecting and localising copy‐paste forgeries in images than the existing works. Also the proposed work detects multiple copy–pasted regions in the images and is robust to attacks such as geometrical transformation of copied regions such as scaling and rotation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Video games, and more generally computer games, are unquestionably technological artefacts that have cultural significance. Old computer games in particular had to function under technical constraints that would be alien to many modern programmers, while at the same time providing something novel and at first foreign to consumers. How did their creators accomplish their technical feats, and what impact did that have for the player-consumer? The study of 'retro' computer games' implementation is one topic within the nascent area of archaeogaming. Digital rights management (DRM) continues to be a major issue in the protection and distribution of content in electronic form. In this article, we study an early example of the implementation of copy protection in the 1984 game Jet Set Willy, something that comprises both physical and digital artefacts. It acts as a vehicle to illustrate a number of methods that we used to understand game implementation, culminating in a full reconstruction of the technique. The methods we cover include: 'traditional' research, along with its limitations in this context; code and data analysis; hypothesis testing; reconstruction. Through this positivist experimental approach, our results are both independently verifiable and repeatable. We also approach the complex context of early DRM, its hacks and workarounds by the player community, and what precipitated the design choices made for this particular game.

In the cable network services, the audio/video entertainment contents should be protected from unauthorized copying, intercepting, and tampering. Point-of-deployment (POD) security module, proposed by OpenCableTM, allows viewers to receive secure cable services such as premium subscription channels, impulse pay-per-view, video-on-demand as well as other interactive services. In this paper, we present a digital signal processor (DSP) (TMS320C6211) based POD implementation for the real-time applications which include elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA), elliptic curve Diffie Hellman (ECDH) key exchange, elliptic curve key derivation function (ECKDF), cellular automata (CA) cryptography, communication processes between POD and Host, and Host authentication. In order to get different security levels and different rates of encryption/decryption, a CA based symmetric key cryptography algorithm is used whose encryption/decryption rate can be up to 75 Mbps. The experiment results indicate that the DSP based POD implementation provides high speed and flexibility, and satisfies the requirements of real-time video data transmission.

Paralleling with the revolutionary development of the Internet, there has been increasing concern about the copyright infringement of digital media. A central problem in copyright protection is to accurately and efficiently identify the illegal copies of copyrighted contents. Perceptual hash function, which summarises the perceptual characteristics of digital media to a short digest, is a low‐cost solution to this problem. Owing to the easy‐to‐manipulate nature of digital media, a major challenge in designing perceptual hash function is to achieve the robustness against distortion. To tackle this problem, an associative memory‐based hash function is introduced. The proposed work repairs the distortions on local image structures via associative memory‐based de‐noising, in the hope of simulating the self‐correcting mechanism in human memory. The shape invariant descriptors of de‐noised structures are then encoded to binary bits. Experimental results confirm that the proposed work outperforms representative algorithms, and it can achieve an equal error rate of 3.30×10−3 in content identification with only 80 bits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a new video projection technique to defeat camcorder piracy in movie theaters using the newly emerged display paradigm of temporal psychovisual modulation. The technique exploits the difference in image formation mechanisms between human eyes and digital cameras: in the human visual system, images are formed via continuous integration of the light field, whereas digital video acquisition is based on discrete sampling of light sensors. A movie frame is decomposed into multiple so-called shale frames such that, when these shale frames are displayed at a frame rate higher than 60 Hz, the human viewers will experience normal movie presentation without any noticeable artifacts, but the video frames captured by camcorders will contain severe, highly objectionable artifacts, depriving the pirated video contents of any commercial values. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author discusses the Court of Justice of the European Union's ruling in the 2014 case Nintendo Co. Ltd. and others v. PC Box Srl and 9Net Srl which deals with the legal rights of copyright holders in relation to European Union (EU) intellectual property laws and technological measures to circumvent the copy protection controls that are used in videogames and videogame consoles. EU copyright law is also mentioned. The author argues that videogames are more than mere computer programs.

These days, with technological advancement, it is very easy for miscreants to produce illegal multimedia data copies. Various techniques of copyright protection of free data are being developed daily. Digital watermarking is one such technique, where digital embedding of the copyright information/watermark into the data to be protected. The two major ways of doing so are spatial domain and the robust transform domain. In this study, method for watermarking of digital images, with biometric data is presented. The usage of biometric instead of the traditional watermark increases the security of the image data. The biometric used here is iris. After the retinal scan, it is the most unique biometric. In terms of user friendliness in extracting the biometric, it comes after fingerprint and facial scan. The iris biometric template is generated from subject's eye images. The discrete cosine values of templates are extracted through discrete cosine transform and converted to binary code. This binary code is embedded in the singular values of the host image's coefficients generated through wavelet transform. The original image is thus firstly applied with the discrete wavelet transform followed up by the singular value decomposition of the subband coefficients. The algorithm has been tested with popular attacks for analysis of false recognition and rejection of subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adoption of new technology in Japan, despite its international reputation as a high tech nation and culture has not been a smooth progression, nor has Japan always led the world. There have been leaps forward and times of stagnation. In fact I mean to show how Japan has fallen back and needs to reinvigorate its approach to technology, particularly in regards to education and tablet PCs, an area in which Japan has fallen far behind. In both corporate and government policy, Japan is capable of leaps forward but can get bogged down in a slow and steady incremental approach at times. I will propose a path forward for education media here, a field that is still stuck in paper publishing while most of the world moves into digital. A much more open model based on open principles. (Note; Due to the fast changing nature of this issue, this article includes updated information since the summer 2011 conference in Romania.) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Audio scrambling can be employed to ensure confidentiality in audio distribution. We first describe scrambling for raw audio using the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) first and then focus on MP3 audio scrambling. We perform scrambling based on a set of keys which allows for a set of audio outputs having different qualities. During descrambling, the number of keys provided and the number of rounds of descrambling performed will decide the audio output quality. We also perform scrambling by using multiple keys on the MP3 audio format. With a subset of keys, we can descramble to obtain a low quality audio. However, we can obtain the original quality audio by using all of the keys. Our experiments show that the proposed algorithms are effective, fast, simple to implement while providing flexible control over the progressive quality of the audio output. The security level provided by the scheme is sufficient for protecting MP3 music content. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we present two novel robust methods for embedding watermarks into dithered halftone images. The first method is named paired subimage matching ordered dithering (PSMOD), of which the decoder is provided with a priori information of the original watermark, and the corresponding application is copyright protection. The other method, blind paired subimage matching ordered dithering (BPSMOD), does not require the knowledge of the original watermark, and the main application is secret communication. Both methods utilize the bit and sub-subimage interleaving preprocesses. The experiments show that both techniques are sufficiently robust to guard against the cropping, tampering, and print-and-scan degradation processes, in either B/W or color dithered images. Both techniques are also sufficiently flexible for various levels of embedded capacities. Furthermore, a novel progressive coding scheme is also presented in this paper for the efficient display of dithered images. After the preprocessing of bit-interleaving, this algorithm utilizes the characteristic of reordered image to determine the transmitting order and then progressively reconstructs the dithered image. Moreover, the dithered images are further compressed by lossy and lossless procedures. The experimental results demonstrate high-quality reconstructions while maintaining low transmitted bit rates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article's objective is to develop a model for measuring the security strength of dongle-protected software. We believe such a measure is important because it can attach a clear, simple, and understandable monetization number to security. Dongles are USB keys or small boxes attached to the host parallel port. The copy-protected application interacts with the dongle and progresses its execution only if the dongle answers appropriately. The interaction between the software and the dongle takes place through calls to the dongle API. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A major limitation of some recently proposed asymmetric Watermarking techniques based on linear algebra lies in the strong dependence of the watermark on the original image. The present correspondence suggests an alternative scheme that not only is secure against projection attack but also allows the insertion of arbitrary watermarking sequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital fingerprinting is a forensic method against illegal copying. The distributor marks each individual copy with a unique fingerprint. If an illegal copy appears, it can be traced back to one or more guilty pirates due to this fingerprint. To work against a coalition of several pirates, the fingerprinting scheme must be based on a collusion-secure code. This paper addresses binary collusion-secure codes in the setting of Boneh and Shaw (1995/1998). We prove that the Boneh-Shaw scheme is more efficient than originally proven, and we propose adaptations to further improve the scheme. We also point out some differences between our model and others in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In October 2005, Sysinternals' Mark Russinovich discovered a rootkit on his computer, which he later determined stemmed from a Sony-BMG compact disc. In this article, the authors examine the copy-protection software found on those discs and the implications for digital rights management. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]