Image Manipulation Specifications on Social Networking Services for Encryption-then-Compression Systems

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the robustness of Encryption-then-Compression (EtC) systems against image manipulations on social media platforms, demonstrating their applicability across major SNS providers.

Contribution

It investigates how encrypted images are affected by social media manipulations and confirms the viability of EtC systems for secure image transmission on SNS.

Findings

EtC systems are applicable to major SNS platforms.

Encrypted images can withstand typical social media manipulations.

Encryption schemes maintain image integrity post-upload.

Abstract

Encryption-then-Compression (EtC) systems have been proposed to securely transmit images through an untrusted channel provider. In this study, EtC systems were applied to social media like Twitter that carry out image manipulations. The block scrambling-based encryption schemes used in EtC systems were evaluated in terms of their robustness against image manipulation on social media. The aim was to investigate how five social networking service (SNS) providers, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr and Flickr, manipulate images and to determine whether the encrypted images uploaded to SNS providers can avoid being distorted by such manipulations. In an experiment, encrypted and non-encrypted JPEG images were uploaded to various SNS providers. The results show that EtC systems are applicable to the five SNS providers.