Statistical Theory and Algorithms for Signal Authentication

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

Moulin, Pierre U of Ill Urbana- Champaign The enormous growth in electronic commerce has led to an urgent need for the protection and authentication of information, which now is stored and transmitted in massive amounts. There is a multitude of applications where a signal (typically audio, image or video) is to be communicated to a receiver, along with information such as ownership identification or a timestamp authenticating the signal. The communication channel on which the signal is transmitted may be insecure, i.e., an adversary may modify the signal in such a way that it can no longer be reliably authenticated. In some applications (e.g., wireless video transmission) the channel is considered to be insecure not due to the presence of an adversary, but because of the significant degradations introduced by the transmission medium. A secret message necessary for authentication may be embedded in the signal (watermarking-based authentication) or transmitted on a separate channel (hashing- based authentication). In watermarking, the host data set is intentionally corrupted, but in a covert way, designed to be imperceptible to a casual analysis. Hashing does not require the signal to be modified, but requires the transmission of side information about the signal (authentication tag) on a separate channel. Signal authentication encompasses applications such as forgery detection and analysis, copyright protection for digital media, copy control, fingerprinting (traitor tracing), and database query and retrieval [1]|[30]. Watermarking and authentication are now major activities in audio, image, and video processing, and standardization efforts for JPEG-2000, MPEG-4, and Digital Video Disks are well underway. Commercial products are being developed. Annual International Workshops on information hiding have been held in 1996, and every year since 1998. Special issues of major technical journals have recently been recently devoted to information protection [31, 32, 33, 34], and comprehensive surveys of image and multimedia watermarking techniques are available from [35, 36].