Digital Image Protection using Keyed Hash Function

Digital image authentication is an essential attribute for protecting digital image from piracy and copyright violator. Anti-piracy, digital watermarking, and ownership verification are some mechanisms evolving over the years for achieving digital image authentication. Cryptographic primitives, such as hash function, digital signature, and message authentication codes are being used in several applications including digital image authentication. Use of Least Significant Bit (LSB) is one of the classical approaches for digital image authentication. Although LSB approach is efficient, it does not provide adequate security services. On the other hand, digital signature-based image authentication provides better security, but with added computational cost in comparison with LSB approach. Furthermore, digital signature-based authentication approach requires managing public key infrastructure. Considering security weakness of LSB-based approach and cost overhead of public key based approach, the authors present a digital image authentication scheme using LSB and message authentication codes (MAC). The MAC-based approach for authenticating digital image is secure and efficient approach without public key management overhead. The authors also provide experimental results of the proposed scheme using MATLAB. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme is efficient and secure in comparisons with other schemes.