Presenter

Mr Gabor Fodor - Vrije Universiteit Brussel [Email]

Abstract

Digital media security is an emerging cross-disciplinary research domain that combines elements of multiple fields, such as computer science, mathematics, law, criminal justice and data mining. The ease of capturing, manipulating, distributing, and consuming digital media has motivated new applications and raised a number of important security challenges. Managing multimedia rights, enforcing copyright protection, tracking down stolen multimedia content are very important issues today.
Depending on the desired level and scope of security, we usually differentiate between three key requirements: access control, copyright protection and ownership tracking. Each of these aspects involve different technological solutions that are often combined together to provide resilient protection against a wide range of exploits and potential attacks.
The research presented in this thesis improves upon the current state of digital multimedia security by putting together the combined advances in the fields of encryption, watermarking and traitor tracing. The applications touch upon a multitude of topics, all sharing a common link of multimedia processing within the context of security and forensics, with a special focus on fingerprinting codes, security of watermarking/encryption schemes in video and image processing applications in art forensics.
The presented research can be broadly divided into three major contributions. The first one focuses on traitor tracing codes, their construction and application. Traitor tracing codes enable the identification of the source of leaked materials, hence finding short, robust and secure codes is crucial. The second main area is the research done on combined watermarking/encryption frameworks, evaluating the security trade-offs and technical difficulties of such systems along with an in-depth analysis of partial encryption in motion vector sign based encryption systems for videos. The last area describes the work done on art investigation, using image processing tools in the service of art forensics, with the resulting software package made open-source and widely available to the art community.

Short CV

BSc at UCL (2010) and MSc at ULB (2012) in Civil Engineering