Digital Fingerprinting for Multimedia Security and Forensics
With the development of the Internet and multimedia processing techniques, the protection of multimedia content has become increasingly important. While cryptographic encryption is a powerful tool for access control and confidentiality protection, the protection usually terminates once the content is delivered and decrypted. The urgent need of the research effort addressing post-delivery protections come from both national security and commercial applications:
- A crucial lesson from the 9-11 event is the importance in promoting information sharing among agencies. However, due to the potential conflict of interests, the leak of classified information shared between agencies is not uncommon. A recent high-profile leak involves a classified surveillance video on bin Laden's camp. Without effective traitor tracing tools, different agencies would still be reluctant to share critical information. In the mean time, battles against terrorism may occur at any place and at any time and often requires the involvement of allies and strategic partners. To prevent classified information from leaking out of a dedicated group of users, it is essential that content providers have security and forensic capabilities of tracking and identifying entities involved in unauthorized redistribution of multimedia information.
- Multimedia forensic mechanism for tracing traitors also has compelling commercial applications, such as by the Hollywood film industry in anti-piracy campaigns. Hollywood is actively seeking technologies whereby each preview copy of a new movie is individually and invisibly labeled prior to sending to Oscar voting members to prevent the leak to the market. A preliminary technology based on robust watermarking was adopted in the 2004 Oscar Season and successfully captured a few pirates. As with many other information security and forensic research, this "cat-and-mouse" game between technology developer and adversaries is becoming more intense, where smarter attacks (such as multi-user collusion) pose serious challenge to the existing technologies on media security and rights management.
Digital Fingerprinting is an emerging technology to protect multimedia from unauthorized redistribution. It embeds a unique ID into each user's copy, which can be extracted to help identify culprits when an unauthorized leak is found. A powerful, cost-effective attack is the collusion attack from a group of users, where the users combine their copies of the same content but with different fingerprints to generate a new version. If designed improperly, the fingerprints can be attenuated or even removed by the collusion attack.
Our research team at University of Maryland has been taking an interdisciplinary approach to conducting research on digital fingerprinting for multimedia content protection. Our research addresses a number of issues, including theory, design, attacks, and counter-attacks (particularly anti-collusion) for fingerprinting and tracing traitors:
- 2-page research brief (summer 2004)
- A survey and tutorial on multimedia fingerprinting (2004):
M. Wu, W. Trappe, Z. Wang, and K.J.R. Liu: "Collusion Resistant Fingerprinting for Multimedia", IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Special Issue on Digital Rights Management, pp.15-27, March 2004. [PDF]
- Understanding the linear and nonlinear collusions:
H. Zhao, M. Wu, Z. Wang, and K.J.R. Liu: "Forensic Analysis of Nonlinear Collusion Attacks for Multimedia Fingerprinting," IEEE Trans. on Image Proc., vol.14, no.5, pp.646-661, May 2005. [PDF]
- Analyzing the limit on collusion resistance by orthogonal fingerprinting:
Z. Wang, M. Wu, H. Zhao, W. Trappe, and K.J.R. Liu: "Collusion Resistance of Multimedia Fingerprinting Using Orthogonal Modulation", IEEE Trans. on Image Proc., vol.14, no.6, pp.804-821, June 2005. [PDF]
- Proposing a new framework of joint coding, embedding, and detection:
(demonstrating the framework through a new combinatorial based code)
W. Trappe, M. Wu, Z. Wang, K.J.R. Liu, “Anti-Collusion Fingerprinting for Multimedia,” IEEE Trans. on Sig. Proc., Special issue on Data Hiding in Digital Media & Secure Content Delivery, 51 (4), pp.1069-1087, April 2003. (Received 2005 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award) [PDF]
(recent work built upon error correcting codes)
S. He and M. Wu: "Joint Coding and Embedding Techniques for Multimedia Fingerprinting," IEEE Trans. on Info. Forensics and Security, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 231-247, June 2006. [PDF]
S. He and M. Wu: “Collusion-Resistant Video Fingerprinting for Large User Group,” IEEE Trans. on Info. Forensics and Security, vol. 2, no. 4, to appear December 2007.
- Leveraging prior information on collusion pattern via group fingerprinting:
Z. Wang, M. Wu, W. Trappe, and K.J.R. Liu: "Group-Oriented Fingerprinting for Multimedia Forensics", EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing, Special Issue on Multimedia Security and Rights Management, Nov. 2004. (Received 2004 EURASIP Best Paper Award) [PDF]
S. He and M. Wu: “Adaptive Detection for Group-based Multimedia Fingerprinting,” IEEE Signal Processing Letters, to appear.
- Fingerprinting maps that can survive collusion, format conversion, and print-scan, with application to modernize the protection of map and geospatial data:
H. Gou and M. Wu: "Data Hiding in Curves with Applications to Map Fingerprinting," IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing, Special Issue on Secure Media, vol. 53, no. 10, pp. 3988-4005, Oct. 2005. [PDF]
- Secure and efficient distribution of fingerprinted video:
H. V. Zhao and K. J. R. Liu, “Fingerprint Multicast in Secure Video Streaming”, IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, 2006. [html]
These research activities were supported in part by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory under Digital Data Embedding Technology (DDET) Grant#F30602-03-2-0045 and #FA8750-05-1-0238; and by the Office of Naval Research under Young Investigator Program Grant#N00014-05-1-0634.
=> Click here for an expanded list of publications on digital fingerprinting, digital watermarking, and information security and forensics ...
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