The widespread adoption of location-based services (LBS) raises increasing concerns for the protection of personal location information. A common strategy, referred to as obfuscation, to protect location privacy is based on forwarding the LSB provider a coarse user location instead of the actual user location. Conventional approaches, based on such tech- nique, are however based only on geometric methods and therefore are unable to assure privacy when the adversary has semantic knowledge about the reference spatial context. This paper provides a comprehensive solution to this problem. Our solution presents a novel approach that obfuscates the user location by taking into account the semantic knowl- edge about the reference space. In the paper, we dene sev- eral theoretical notions underlying our approach. We then propose two dierent strategies for generating obfuscated spaces. The paper also includes several experimental results assessing performance, storage requirements and accuracy for the two approaches. The paper also discusses the system architecture and shows that the approach can be deployed also for clients running on small devices.

Theoretical and empirical results give mixed advice for choosing the cardinality for GA representation.  Using GA models that capture the exact expected behavior of both the binary and higher cardinality cases, the determination of which representation is best for a given GA can be made.  De Jong et al. and Spears and De Jong presented how the exact model for the binary genetic algorithm can give important insights to transient GA behavior.  This paper uses a similar approach to study the impact of different cardinalities using the Koehler-Bhattacharyya-Vose general cardinality model.

Scalable video compression is the encoding of a single video sequence into multiple layers, each layer with its own data rate. Because of the computational complexity of full video encryption, partial encryption has emerged as a general trend for both standard and scalable video codecs. Depending on the application, a particular layer of the video stream is chosen for encryption. In some applications, however, more than one video layer may need to be protected. This results in more complicated key management as multiple keys are needed. In this paper, we present an integrated approach to encrypting multiple layers. Our proposal is a prepositioned shared secret scheme that enables the reconstruction of different keys by communicating different activating shares for the same prepositioned information. It presents advantages over three other key management schemes.

With the advent of digital technologies, many new market opportunities have emerged for content owners, content distributors, and consumer electronics/information technology industries.  An essential requirement for developing a thriving marketplace is the protection of copyrighted content in digital form.  There are four major stages in the delivery of content to the consumer:  (1) capturing on digital media, (2) packaging, (3) distribution to home networks, and (4) transfer to the final audio/visual device within the home network.  Entertainment content is of particular importance as it will be in high demand for many years to come.  If an end-to-end security cannot be provided in a digital market, there would be no incentive for content creation.  Lack of new supplies would result in detrimental effects for all the industries involved in the delivery chain.  In this paper, we present the primary means of securing the entertainment content from creation to consumption in an attempt to understand the overall complexity of the problem.

Video streaming, or the real-time delivery of video over a data network, is the underlying technology behind many applications including video conferencing, video-on-demand, and the delivery of educational and entertainment content.  In many applications, particularly ones involving entertainment content, security issues, such as conditional access and copy protection must be addressed. To resolve these security issues, techniques that include encryption and watermarking need to be developed.  Since the video sequences will often be compressed using a scalable compression technique and transported over a lossy packet network using the Internet Protocol (IP), the security techniques must be compatible with the compression method and data transport and be robust to errors. In this paper, we address the issues involved in the watermarking of rate-scalable video streams delivered using a practical network. Watermarking is the embedding of a signal (the watermark) into a video stream that is imperceptible when the stream is viewed but can be detected by a watermark detector.  Many watermarking techniques have been proposed for digital images and video, but the issues of streaming have not been fully investigated.  A review of streaming video is presented, including scalable video compression and network transport, followed by a brief review of video watermarking and the discussion of watermarking streaming video.

A digital home network is a cluster of digital audio/visual (A/V) devices including set-top boxes, TVs, VCRs, DVD players, and general-purpose computing devices such as personal computers. The network may receive copyrighted digital multimedia content from a number of sources. This content may be broadcast via satellite or terrestrial systems, transmitted by cable operators, or made available as prepackaged media (e.g., a digital tape or a digital video disc). Before releasing their content for distribution, the content owners may require protection by specifying access conditions. Once the content is delivered to the consumer, it moves across the home network until it reaches its destination where it is stored or displayed. A copy protection system is needed to prevent unauthorized access to bit streams in transmission from one A/V device to another or while it is in storage on magnetic or optical media. Recently, two fundamental groups of technologies, encryption and watermarking, have been identified for protecting copyrighted digital multimedia content. This paper is an overview of the work done for protecting content owners’ investment in intellectual property.

Digital watermarking research has generally focused upon two classes of watermarks, fragile and robust.  Robust watermarks are designed to be detected even after attempts are made to remove them.  Fragile watermarks are used for authentication purposes and are capable of detecting even minute changes of the watermarked content.  Unfortunately, neither type of watermark is ideal when considering “information preserving” transformations (such as compression) which preserve the meaning or expression of the content and “information altering” transformations (such as feature replacement) which change the expression of the content.  In this paper we describe a semi-fragile watermark for still images that can detect information altering transformations even after the watermarked content is subjected to information preserving alterations.

A digital home network is a cluster of digital audio/visual (A/V) devices including set-top boxes, TVs, VCRs,  DVD players, and general-purpose computing devices such as personal computers.  The network may receive copyrighted digital multimedia content from a number of sources.  This content may be broadcast via satellite or terrestrial systems, transmitted by cable operators, or made available as prepackaged media (e.g., a digital tape or a digital video disc).  Before releasing their content for distribution, the content owners may require protection by specifying access conditions.  Once the content is delivered to the consumer, it moves across home the network until it reaches its destination where it is stored or displayed.  A copy protection system is needed to prevent unauthorized access to bit streams in transmission from one A/V device to another or while it is in storage on magnetic or optical media.  Recently, two fundamental groups of technologies, encryption and watermarking, have been identified for protecting copyrighted digital multimedia content.  This paper is an overview of the work done for protecting content owners’ investment in intellectual property.

Many image watermarks have been proposed to protect intellectual property in an age there digital images may be easily modified and perfectly reproduced. In a fragile marking system, a signal (watermark) is embedded within an image such that subsequent alterations to the watermarked image can be detected with high probability. The insertion of the watermark is perceptually invisible under normal human observation. These types of marks have found applicability in image authentication systems. In this paper we discuss fragile marking systems and their desirable features, common methods of attack, and survey some recent marking systems.

In this paper we will overview the use of data hiding techniques in digital images. In particular we will describe how one can use Steganography to hide information in a digital image. Steganography is related to cryptography and is the basis for many of the digital watermarking techniques currently being developed. The interest in data hiding has risen with the recent activity in digital copyright protection schemes. One way to protect the ownership of a digital image is to secretly embed data in the content of the image identifying the owner. This paper will review recent developments in data hiding, specifically as it pertains to copyright protection of digital images.