Counter-Forensics: Attacking Image Forensics

Abstract

This chapter discusses counter-forensics, the art and science of impeding or misleading forensic analyses of digital images. Research on counter-forensics is motivated by the need to assess and improve the reliability of forensic methods in situations where intelligent adversaries make efforts to induce a certain outcome of forensic analyses. Counter-forensics is first defined in a formal decision-theoretic framework. This framework is then interpreted and extended to encompass the requirements to forensic analyses in practice, including a discussion of the notion of authenticity in the presence of legitimate processing, and the role of image models with regard to the epistemic underpinning of the forensic decision problem. A terminology is developed that distinguishes security from robustness properties, integrated from post-processing attacks, and targeted from universal attacks. This terminology is directly applied in a self-contained technical survey of counter-forensics against image forensics, notably techniques that suppress traces of image processing and techniques that synthesize traces of authenticity, including examples and brief evaluations. A discussion of relations to other domains of multimedia security and an overview of open research questions concludes the chapter.

Higher-order, adversary-aware, double JPEG-detection via selected training on attacked samples

“…As a second goal, we aim at improving the resilience against attacks, like geometrical attacks, for which the visual distortion introduced cannot be measured (and hence constrained) on a per-pixel basis. Figure 2 schematises the detection task addressed in this paper 1 : we let H 0 correspond to the case of single compressed images (in the absence of manipulation), and H 1 to the case in which the image is either compressed twice or compressed, attacked and then compressed again. An attack placed in the middle between the two compression stages may correspond to the application of a processing operation or to a C-F attack to single compressed images, i.e.…”

“…Image forensic techniques for double JPEG detection in the presence of an adversary is one of the most widely studied topics in adversarial image forensics [1], [2]. Due to the artifacts left by double JPEG (D-JPEG) compression into the histograms of DCT coefficients [3], most studies have focused on detectors based on first order statistics of block DCT coefficients.…”

Forensics, Anti-forensics and Counter Anti-forensics for JPEG Compressed Images

“…The technique can fool quantization table estimation, MSE distortion analysis and global histogram analysis. Bohme and kirchner [23] in 2013 framed a categorization of forensic methods and pointed out that stamm's anti forensic has not been tested against median filtering forensic detectors so is also evident. Recently, Fan et al in their paper [24] proposed an improved method of JPEG anti-forensics, with a higher visual quality of images.…”

Counter-forensics of SIFT-based copy-move detection by means of keypoint classification

“…Counter-forensics, the study of methods to mislead forensic techniques by concealing traces of manipulations, is becoming a hot research topic [1]. As a matter of fact, this discipline rapidly became a benchmark for the security of image forensic techniques, whose correct behaviors may be intentionally obstructed by an adversary (or attacker) interested on covering traces of malicious tampering.…”