Authentication with Distortion Criteria

TL;DR

This paper introduces an information-theoretic framework for authenticating content that may have been legitimately edited or tampered with, providing performance limits and improved system designs over traditional watermarking methods.

Contribution

It generalizes classical authentication approaches using a strict security notion, characterizes performance limits, and develops layered authentication systems with better security and efficiency.

Findings

Performance bounds for authentication with legitimate edits

Specialized results for Bernoulli and Gaussian cases

Layered authentication system constructions

Abstract

In a variety of applications, there is a need to authenticate content that has experienced legitimate editing in addition to potential tampering attacks. We develop one formulation of this problem based on a strict notion of security, and characterize and interpret the associated information-theoretic performance limits. The results can be viewed as a natural generalization of classical approaches to traditional authentication. Additional insights into the structure of such systems and their behavior are obtained by further specializing the results to Bernoulli and Gaussian cases. The associated systems are shown to be substantially better in terms of performance and/or security than commonly advocated approaches based on data hiding and digital watermarking. Finally, the formulation is extended to obtain efficient layered authentication system constructions.