Antitamper Image Watermarking Based on Cellular Network Topology for IoT-Themed Mobile Forensics

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects physical and digital worlds with mobile devices, accompanied by a surge in cybersecurity issues. With the rapid adoption of mobile devices, mobile forensics emerges as a new interdisciplinary field that concerns many forms of sabotage and cybercrime in the context of mobile computing. One of the most common cyberattacks is tampering. Digital watermarking is a tamper-evident technique used to protect data integrity. In this paper, we present an antitamper image watermarking scheme designed for mobile communications with low computational cost. A reference matrix based on cellular network topology is introduced to guide the watermark embedding and extraction processes. This reference matrix serves as a lookup table to reduce computational complexity, thereby enabling efficient implementation on mobile devices. Our scheme is aimed at offering high accuracy in detecting and localizing tampered regions. We also achieve a high watermarking capacity while leaving the visual quality of the carrier images nearly unharmed. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our scheme against various types of simulated forgery including cropping and copy/paste attacks.