Central Concerns and Questions

Multimedia content is everywhere and is playing an increasingly important role in sensitive application fields such as government, finance, health care and the law. In application fields such as these, it is critical and often a requirement to secure multimedia content in transient and in storage. Authentication is the ability to check the integrity as well as the origin of the multimedia content. Access control allows use of multimedia content according to users' privileges.

Emerging Ideas and Initiatives

Modern multimedia coding standards, such as JPEG2000 and MPEG-4, are scalable, i. e., they are designed for “encoding once and decoding many times”. They support extraction of subcode streams with different resolutions, qualities, frame rates and regions-of-interest, all from the same compressed code stream. This functionality allows applications to manipulate or disclose only the required subcode streams for any target users based their privileges, device capabilities or network bandwidth.

We study authentication and access control systems for scalable multimedia coding standards. Our access control technique for JPEG2000 is secure against collusion attacks and is highly flexible, allowing access control to code streams according to any combination of resolution, quality and region-of-interest. Our authentication techniques for JPEG2000 and MPEG-4 are fully compatible with the core parts of the standards. They allow users to verify the authenticity and integrity of any subcode streams extracted from a single code stream protected with a single digital signature. In addition, by integrating seamlessly cryptographic techniques and erasure correction coding, our authentication system for MPEG-4 achieves high probability of successful authentication for code streams transmitted over lossy networks.

Selected Publications

[1] R. H. Deng, Y. Wu and D. Ma.Securing JPEG2000 code-streams. D. T. Lee, S. Shieh and D. J. Tygar (Eds.), pp. 229-253, Computer Security in the 21 st Century, 268 pages, Springer 2005.

[2] R. H. Deng, D. Ma, W. Shao and Y. Wu.Scalable trusted online dissemination of JPEG2000 images. ACM Multimedia Systems Journal, Vol. 11, pp. 60-67, November 2005.

[3] Y. Wu and R. H. Deng. Scalable authentication of MPEG-4 streams.IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 152-161, Feb. 2006.

[4] Y. Wu, D. Ma and R. H. Deng. Flexible access control to JPEG2000 image code-streams. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, Vol. 9, No. 6, pp. 1314-1324, October 2007.

[5] R. H. Deng and Y. Yang. Achieving end-to-end authentication in intermediary-enabled multimedia delivery. Proceedings of the 3rd Information Security Practice and Experience Conference (ISPEC 2007), LNCS 4464, pp. 284-300, Springer, May 7-9, Hong Kong, China.

Projects, Presentations and Posters

1. Robert H. Deng, Flexible Authentication of JPEG2000 and MPEG-4 (poster)
2. Robert H. Deng, Application of Cryptographic and Error-Correction Coding Techniques in Multimedia Content Authentication (presentation)

Collaborations and Industry Linkages

1. Institute for Infocomm Research