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:

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:

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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Suggestions? Questions? Comments? Please contact Min Wu at "minwu AT umd DOT edu".
Copyright 2002-2006 Min Wu  All rights reserved. Last modified 10/2007.