On the security of block scrambling-based etc systems against extended jigsaw puzzle solver attacks

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to apply automatic jigsaw puzzle solvers, which are methods of assembling jigsaw puzzles, to the field of information security. Encryption-then-Compression (EtC) systems have been considered for the user-controllable privacy protection of digital images in social network services. Block scrambling-based encryption schemes, which have been proposed to construct EtC systems, have enough key spaces for protecting brute-force attacks. However, each block in encrypted images has almost the same correlation as that of original images. Therefore, it is required to consider the security from different viewpoints from number theory-based encryption methods with provable security such as RSA and AES. In this paper, existing jigsaw puzzle solvers, which aim to assemble puzzles including only scrambled and rotated pieces, are first reviewed in terms of attacking strategies on encrypted images. Then, an extended jigsaw puzzle solver for block scrambling-based encryption scheme is proposed to solve encrypted images including inverted, negative-positive transformed and color component shuffled blocks in addition to scrambled and rotated ones. In the experiments, the jigsaw puzzle solvers are applied to encrypted images to consider the security conditions of the encryption schemes.