A cloud-based buyer-seller watermarking protocol (CB-BSWP) using semi-trusted third party for copy deterrence and privacy preserving

Abstract

Nowadays, cloud computing provides a platform infrastructure for the secure dealing of digital data, but privacy and copy control are the two important issues in it over a network. Cloud data is available to the end user and requires enormous security and privacy techniques to protect the data. Moreover, the access control mechanism with encryption-based technique protects the digital rights for participants in a transaction, but they do not protect the media from being illegally redistributed and do not restrict an authorized user to reveal their secret information this is referred to as you can access but you cannot leak. This brought out a need for controlling copy deterrence and preserving the privacy of digital media over the internet. To overlook this, we proposed a cloud-based buyer-seller watermarking protocol (CB-BSWP) with the use of a semi-trusted third party for copy deterrence and privacy-preserving in the cloud environment. The suggested scheme uses 1) a privacy homomorphism cryptosystem with Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm to provide an encrypted domain for the secure exchange of digital media 2) adopt robust and fair watermarking techniques to ensure high imperceptibility and robustness for the watermarked images against attacks 3) two services of cloud Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to support virtualized computing infrastructure and Watermarking as a service (WaaS) to execute the speedy process of watermarking, this process is supported by watermarking generation and signing phase (WGSP) and watermark extraction and verifying phase reported in 4th section. 4) cloud service provider (CSP) considered as a “semi-trusted” third party to reduce the burden from the trusted third party (TTP) server and provide storage for the encrypted digital media on cloud databases, this frees content owner from not having a separate storage infrastructure. The proposed scheme encrypts the digital content by using SHA-512 algorithm with key size 512-bits to ensure that it doesn’t affect computational time during the process of encryption. The suggested scheme addresses the problems of piracy tracing, anonymity, tamper resistance, non-framing, customer rights problem. The role of cloud is crucial because it reduces communication overhead, provides unlimited storage, supports the watermarking process and offers a solution for the secure distribution of end-to-end security of digital content over cloud. To check the performance of the suggested CB-BSWP protocol against common image processing attacks, we have conducted experiments in which the perceptual quality of watermarked digital media was found enhanced, resulting in a robust watermark.