Joint fingerprinting and decryption for multimedia content tracing in wireless networks

Wireless Multimedia applications increasingly demand low power and bandwidth efficient techniques for content protection. Existing partial encryption methodologies juggle with the difficulties of trading decoding complexity for a higher bit rate, maintaining format compliance yet minimizing the number of components that need to be encrypted, to produce the desired distortion. Source based fingerprinting schemes for content tracking are neither bandwidth efficient nor computationally efficient when coupled with encryption. Thus inspired by the chameleon cipher we present a new algorithm for fingerprinting JPEG compressed images and a simple analytical model based on joint fingerprinting and decryption, as a computationally and bandwidth efficient solution for content protection and tracking.