Deep Learning-based Dual Watermarking for Image Copyright Protection and Authentication

Advancements in digital technologies make it easy to modify the content of digital images. Hence, ensuring digital images integrity and authenticity is necessary to protect them against various attacks that manipulate them. We present a Deep Learning (DL) based dual invisible watermarking technique for performing source authentication, content authentication, and protecting digital content copyright of images sent over the internet. Beyond securing images, the proposed technique demonstrates robustness to content-preserving image manipulations. It is also impossible to imitate or overwrite watermarks because the cryptographic hash of the image and the dominant features of the image in the form of perceptual hash are used as watermarks. We highlighted the need for source authentication to safeguard image integrity and authenticity, along with identifying similar content for copyright protection. After exhaustive testing, we obtained a high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM), which implies there is a minute change in the original image after embedding our watermarks. Our trained model achieves high watermark extraction accuracy and to the best of our knowledge, this is the first deep learning-based dual watermarking technique proposed in the literature.

Attack GAN (AGAN ): A new Security Evaluation Tool for Perceptual Encryption

Training state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning models requires a large amount of data. The visual information present in the training data can be misused, which creates a huge privacy concern. One of the prominent solutions for this issue is perceptual encryption, which converts images into an unrecognizable format to protect the sensitive visual information in the training data. This comes at the cost of a significant reduction in the accuracy of the models. Adversarial Visual Information Hiding (AV IH) overcomes this drawback to protect image privacy by attempting to create encrypted images that are unrecognizable to the human eye while keeping relevant features for the target model. In this paper, we introduce the Attack GAN (AGAN ) method, a new Generative Adversarial Network (GAN )-based attack that exposes multiple vulnerabilities in the AV IH method. To show the adaptability, the AGAN is extended to traditional perceptual encryption methods of Learnable encryption (LE) and Encryption-then-Compression (EtC). Extensive experiments were conducted on diverse image datasets and target models to validate the efficacy of our AGAN method. The results show that AGAN can successfully break perceptual encryption methods by reconstructing original images from their AV IH encrypted images. AGAN can be used as a benchmark tool to evaluate the robustness of encryption methods for privacy protection such as AV IH.

DLOVE: A new Security Evaluation Tool for Deep Learning Based Watermarking Techniques

Recent developments in Deep Neural Network (DNN) based watermarking techniques have shown remarkable performance. The state-of-the-art DNN-based techniques not only surpass the robustness of classical watermarking techniques but also show their robustness against many image manipulation techniques. In this paper, we performed a detailed security analysis of different DNN-based watermarking techniques. We propose a new class of attack called the Deep Learning-based OVErwriting (DLOVE) attack, which leverages adversarial machine learning and overwrites the original embedded watermark with a targeted watermark in a watermarked image. To the best of our knowledge, this attack is the first of its kind. We have considered scenarios where watermarks are used to devise and formulate an adversarial attack in white box and black box settings. To show adaptability and efficiency, we launch our DLOVE attack analysis on seven different watermarking techniques, HiDDeN, ReDMark, PIMoG, Stegastamp, Aparecium, Distortion Agostic Deep Watermarking and Hiding Images in an Image. All these techniques use different approaches to create imperceptible watermarked images. Our attack analysis on these watermarking techniques with various constraints highlights the vulnerabilities of DNN-based watermarking. Extensive experimental results validate the capabilities of DLOVE. We propose DLOVE as a benchmark security analysis tool to test the robustness of future deep learning-based watermarking techniques.

Generalized Deepfake Attribution

The landscape of fake media creation changed with the introduction of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN s). Fake media creation has been on the rise with the rapid advances in generation technology, leading to new challenges in Detecting fake media. A fundamental characteristic of GAN s is their sensitivity to parameter initialization, known as seeds. Each distinct seed utilized during training leads to the creation of unique model instances, resulting in divergent image outputs despite employing the same architecture. This means that even if we have one GAN architecture, it can produce countless variations of GAN models depending on the seed used. Existing methods for attributing deepfakes work well only if they have seen the specific GAN model during training. If the GAN architectures are retrained with a different seed, these methods struggle to attribute the fakes. This seed dependency issue made it difficult to attribute deepfakes with existing methods. We proposed a generalized deepfake attribution network (GDA-N et) to attribute fake images to their respective GAN architectures, even if they are generated from a retrained version of the GAN architecture with a different seed (cross-seed) or from the fine-tuned version of the existing GAN model. Extensive experiments on cross-seed and fine-tuned data of GAN models show that our method is highly effective compared to existing methods. We have provided the source code to validate our results.