The Digital Rights Management (DRM) has become one of the newest issue in the security research. It can also be understood as management of intellectual property. The main driving force is concern over copyright protection and content protection. As audio, video, text, and other works become available in digital form, it is more easier to make perfect but unauthorized copies in a large scale. This is of great concern to the music, film, book, and software publishing industries. There are technical, legal, social and business aspects involved in the digital rights management. My research is focused on the technical aspect.
Digital watermarking and perceptual hashing are the two important mechanisms of DRM, which have never fully been analyzed with respect to security and usage. These two techniques broaden the scope of the research beyond the classical cryptologic techniques into the domain embedded signaling and fuzzy signatures.
"Watermarking" together with "steganography", are the two sub-disciplines of the research area called "Information Hiding". While cryptology is the science that studies mathematical techniques in order to provide secrecy, authenticity, and related properties for digital information; watermarking, on the other hand, allows embedding information into digital media, such that the watermark is imperceptible and difficult to remove. Cryptology and watermarking are interdisciplinary research areas with a strategic impact for industry and for society as a whole.
Current research tries to extend the "traditional hashing" into "Perceptual Hashing". Instead of using the binary representation as the input for the hash function, perceptual features of multimedia data are used. This topic is the starting point of my PhD research.
Supervisor:
Prof.dr.ir. Bart Preneel, KU Leuven.