Security of Scalable Video Coding: Encryption and Authentication

Abstract

This chapter presents the analysis and evaluation of scalable video coding (SVC). It describes encryption and authentication schemes for SVC, respectively. An SVC bitstream consists of a low-quality video sub-bitstream as well as one or more supplement sub-bitstreams. Scalable video streaming techniques are widely used in real time content distribution due to their adaptability to a variety of heterogeneous network and platform settings. Partial encryption is to preserve multimedia property by treating different data in a multimedia stream differently according to their importance. The chapter investigates whether partial encryption in H.264/SVC can protect data confidentiality. Most video coding standards including MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and H.264 achieve compression by identifying similarities in the spatial and the temporal dimensions. The common flaw of existing transform-domain content-based authentication (CBA) schemes is that the feature extracted is insufficient to truly represent the video semantic. The chapter demonstrates transform-domain attack examples that can be applied on each category of CBA schemes.