Joint Encryption and Reversible Watermarking Scheme for Secure Data Authentication and Integrity Verification
Keywords:
Content authentication, Difference expansion, Histogram shifting, Homomorphic encryption, Integrity verification, Reversible watermarkingAbstract
Reversible watermarking, distinguished from conventional watermarking by its capacity to restore the original host content without residual distortion upon authenticated watermark extraction, has emerged as a critical technology for applications demanding lossless data fidelity alongside provenance authentication—including medical imaging, forensic evidence management, satellite remote sensing, and legal document processing. This paper presents a novel joint encryption and reversible watermarking scheme that integrates homomorphic encryption properties with reversible data hiding based on difference expansion (DE) and histogram shifting (HS) techniques to provide simultaneous data confidentiality, authentication, and integrity verification without sacrificing content fidelity upon authorised extraction. The proposed scheme operates in the encrypted domain, enabling cloud-based service providers to embed authentication watermarks into encrypted content without requiring decryption access, preserving content confidentiality from intermediate processing entities. The joint optimisation framework minimises the total distortion introduced during embedding under constraints of watermark capacity and computational efficiency. Authentication is implemented through a hierarchical scheme combining SHA-3 content hashing with an embedded authentication code, enabling both global content authentication and localised tamper detection with pixel-level granularity. Experimental evaluation on medical imaging datasets, including the CheXpert chest radiograph database and ISIC skin lesion database, demonstrates lossless content recovery with embedding capacities exceeding 1.2 bits per pixel at PSNR values above 50 dB during transmission. The scheme achieves false acceptance rates below 10-6 and false rejection rates below 10-4 for tamper detection, substantially improving upon state-of-the-art reversible authentication watermarking approaches.
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