Design Principles for Active Audio and Video Fingerprinting

Active fingerprinting combines digital media watermarking and codes for collusion-secure customer identification. This requires specialized strategies for watermark embedding to lessen the thread of attacks like marked media comparison or mixing. We introduce basic technologies for fingerprinting and digital watermarking and possible attacks against active fingerprinting. Based on this, we provide test results, discuss the consequences and suggest an optimized embedding method for audio fingerprinting. This chapter appears in the book, Multimedia Security: Steganography and Digital Watermarking Techniques for Protection of Intellectual Property, edited by Chun-Shien Lu. Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. 701 E. Chocolate Avenue, Suite 200, Hershey PA 17033-1240, USA Tel: 717/533-8845; Fax 717/533-8661; URL-http://www.idea-group.com IDEA GROUP PUBLISHING 158 Steinebach & Dittmann Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of Idea Group Inc. is prohibited. INTRODUCTION Robust digital watermarking is the enabling technology for a number of approaches related to copyright protection mechanisms: Proof of ownership on copyrighted material, detection of the originator of illegally made copies and monitoring the usage of the copyrighted multimedia data are typical examples where watermarking is applied. A general overview about digital watermarking can be found in a variety of existing publications, for example in Cox, Miller and Bloom (2002) or Dittmann, Wohlmacher and Nahrstedt (2001). While stopping the reproduction of illegal copies may be the first goal for copyright holders, discouraging pirates from distributing copies is the more realistic goal today. It can be observed that current copy protection or digital rights management systems tend to fail in stopping pirates (Pfitzmann, Federrath, & Kuhn, 2002). One important reason for this is the fact that media data usually leave a controlled digital environment when they are consumed, enabling analogue copies of high quality of material protect with digital mechanisms. Under these circumstances, the challenge is to find the most discouraging method making it especially dangerous for pirates to distribute copies. Identification of a copyrighted work by embedding a watermark or retrieving a passive fingerprint (Allamanche, Herre, Helmuth, Fröba, Kasten, & Cremer, 2001) is necessary for preventing large-scale production of illegal CD or DVD copies, but does not stop people from distributing single copies or uploading them to filesharing networks. Here a method that enables the copyright holder to trace an illegal copy to its source would be much more effective, as pirates would loose their anonymity and therefore have to fear detection and punishment. Embedding unique customer identification as a watermark into data to identify illegal copies of documents is called fingerprinting. Basically, watermarks, labels or codes embedded into multimedia data to enforce copyright must uniquely identify the data as property of the copyright holder. They also must be difficult to be removed, even after various media transformation processes. Thus the goal of a label is to always remain present in the data. Digital fingerprinting, which embeds customer information into the data to enable detection of license infringement, raises the additional problem that we produce different copies for each customer. Attackers can compare several fingerprinted copies to find and destroy the embedded identification string by altering the data in those places where a difference was detected. In this chapter, we introduce a method for embedding customer identification into multimedia data: Active digital fingerprinting is a combination of robust digital watermarking and the creation of a collision-secure customer vector. In literature we also find the term collusion secure fingerprinting or coalition attack secure fingerprinting. There is also another mechanism often called fingerprinting in multimedia security, the identification of content with robust hash algorithms; see for example in Haitsma, Kalker and Oostveen (2001). To 14 more pages are available in the full version of this document, which may be purchased using the "Add to Cart" button on the product's webpage: www.igi-global.com/chapter/design-principles-active-audiovideo/27048? camid=4v1 This title is available in InfoSci-Books, InfoSci-Security Technologies, Science, Engineering, and Information Technology, InfoSci-Select, InfoSci-Security and Forensic Science and Technology. Recommend this product to your librarian: www.igi-global.com/e-resources/libraryrecommendation/? id=1