Blockchain Based Copyright Protection And Digital Watermark — Complete Documentation & Simulation

Overview & System Context

Blockchain Based Copyright Protection And Digital Watermark: Comprehensive Web-Sourced Technical Investigation Exhaustive Research Dossier · Pure Web-Scraped Content: ~9636 Words · Real Software Screenshots: 3 1. Executive Overview & Technical Background Digital cloning is an emerging technology, that involves deep-learning algorithms, which allows one to manipulate currently existing audio, photos, and videos that are hyper-realistic. One of the impacts of such technology is that hyper-realistic videos and photos makes it difficult for the human eye to distinguish what is real and what is fake. Furthermore, with various companies making such technologies available to the public, they can bring various benefits as well as potential legal and ethical concerns. Digital cloning can be categorized into audio-visual (AV), memory, personality, and consumer behaviour cloning. In AV cloning, the creation of a cloned digital version of the digital or non-digital original can be used, for example, to create a fake image, an avatar, or a fake video or audio of a person that cannot be easily differentiated from the real person it is purported to represent. A memory and personality clone like a mindclone is essentially a digital copy of a person's mind. A consumer behavior clone is a profile or cluster of customers based on demographics. Truby and Brown coined the term "digital thought clone" to refer to the evolution of digital cloning into a more advanced personalized digital clone that consists of "a replica of all known data and behavior on a specific living person, recording in real-time their choices, preferences, behavioral trends, and decision making processes." Digital cloning first became popular in the entertainment industry. The idea of digital clones originated from movie companies creating virtual actors of actors who have died. When actors die during a movie production, a digital clone of the actor can be synthesized using past footage, photos, and voice recordings to mimic the real person in order to continue the movie production. Modern artificial intelligence, has allowed for the creation of deepfakes. This involves manipulation of a video to the point where the person depicted in the video is saying or performing actions he or she may not have consented to. In April 2018, BuzzFeed released a deepfake video of Jordan Peele, which was manipulated to depict former president Barack Obama making statements he has previously not made in public to warn the public against the potential dangers of deepfakes. In addition to deepfakes, companies such as Intellitar now allows one to easily create a digital clone of themselves by feeding a series of images and voice recordings. This essentially creates digital immortality, allowing loved ones to interact with representations of those who died. Digital cloning not only allows one to digitally memorialize their loved ones, but they can also be used to create representations of historical figures and be used in an educational setting. With the development of various technology, as mentioned above, there are numerous concerns that arises, including identity theft, data breaches, and other ethical concerns. One of the issues with digital cloning is that there are little to no legislations to protect potential victims against these possible problems.

Voice cloning is a case of the audio deepfake methods that uses artificial intelligence to generate a clone of a person's voice. Voice cloning involves deep learning algorithm that takes in voice recordings of an individual and can synthesize such a voice to the point where it can faithfully replicate a human voice with great accuracy of tone and likeness. Cloning a voice requires high-performance computers. Usually, the computations are done using the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), and very often resort to the cloud computing, due to the enormous amount of calculation needed. Audio data for training has to be fed into an artificial intelligence model. These are often original recordings that provide an example of the voice of the person concerned.

Artificial intelligence can use this data to create an authentic voice, which can reproduce whatever is typed, called Text-To-Speech, or spoken, called Speech-To-Speech. This technology worries many because of its impact on various issues, from political discourse to the rule of law. Some of the early warning signs have already appeared in the form of phone scams and fake videos on social media of people doing things they never did. Protections against these threats can be primarily implemented in two ways. The first is to create a way to analyze or detect the authenticity of a video. This approach will inevitably be an upside game as ever-evolving generators defeat these detectors. The second way could be to embed the creation and modification information in software or hardware. This would work only if the data were not editable, but the idea would be to create an inaudible watermark that would act as a source of truth. In other words, we could know if the video is authentic by seeing where it was shot, produced, edited, and so on. 15.ai—a non-commercial freeware web application that began as a proof of concept of the democratization of voice acting and dubbing using technology—gives the public access to such technology. Its gratis and non-commercial nature (with the only stipulation being that the project be properly credited when used), ease of use, and substantial improvements to current text-to-speech implementations have been lauded by users; however, some critics and voice actors have questioned the legality and ethicality of leaving such technology publicly available and readily accessible. Although this application is still in the developmental stage, big technology corporations, such as Google and Amazon are investing vast amounts of money for the development. Some of the positive uses of voice cloning include the ability to synthesize millions of audiobooks without the use of human labor. Also, voice cloning was used to translate podcast content into different languages using the podcaster's voice. Another includes those who may have lost their voice can gain back a sense of individuality by creating their voice clone by inputting recordings of them speaking before they lost their voices. On the other hand, voice cloning is also susceptible to misuse. An example of this is the voices of celebrities and public officials being cloned, and the voice may say something to provoke conflict despite the actual person has no association with what their voice said. In recognition of the threat that voice cloning poses to privacy, civility, and democratic processes, the Institutions, including the Federal Trade Commission, U.S. Department of Justice and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR), have weighed in on various audio deepfake use cases and methods that might be used to combat them.

With a lack of regulations for deepfakes, there are several concerns that have arisen. Some concerning deepfake videos that can bring potential harm includes depiction of political officials displaying inappropriate behavior, police officers shown as shooting unarmed black men, and soldiers murdering innocent civilians may begin to appear although it may have never occurred in real life. With such hyper-realistic videos being released on the Internet, it becomes very easy for the public to be misinformed, which could lead people to take actions, thus contributing to this vicious cycle of unnecessary harm. Additionally, with the rise in fake news in recent news, there is also the possibility of combining deepfakes and fake news. This will bring further difficulty to distinguishing what is real and what is fake. Visual information can be very convincing to the human eyes, therefore, the combination of deepfakes and fake news can have a detrimental effect on society. Strict regulations should be made by social media companies and other platforms for news.

With the current lack of legislations to protect individuals against potential malicious use of digital cloning, the right of publicity may be the best way to protect one in a legal setting. The right of publicity, also referred to as personality rights, gives autonomy to the individual when it comes to controlling their own voice, appearance, and other aspects that essentially makes up their personality in a commercial setting. If a deepfake video or digital clone of one arises without their consent, depicting the individual taking actions or making statements that are out of their personality, they can take legal actions by claiming that it is violating their right to publicity. Although the right to publicity specifically states that it is meant to protect the image of an individual in a commercial setting, which requires some type of profit, some state that the legislation may be updated to protect virtually anyone's image and personality. Another important note is that the right of publicity is only implemented in specific states, so some states may have different interpretations of the right compared to other states.

Figure 1: Digital Image Copyright Protection and Management Approach—Based on ... Cryptography, or cryptology, is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages. Modern cryptography exists at the intersection of the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, information security, electrical engineering, digital signal processing, physics, and others. Core concepts related to information security (data confidentiality, data integrity, authentication and non-repudiation) are also central to cryptography.

Practical applications of cryptography include electronic commerce, chip-based payment cards, digital currencies, computer passwords and military communications. Cryptography prior to the modern age was effectively synonymous with encryption, converting readable information (plaintext) to unintelligible nonsense text (ciphertext), which can only be read by reversing the process (decryption). The sender of an encrypted (coded) message shares the decryption (decoding) technique only with the intended recipients to preclude access from adversaries. The cryptography literature often uses the names "Alice" (or "A") for the sender, "Bob" (or "B") for the intended recipient, and "Eve" (or "E") for the eavesdropping adversary. Since the development of rotor cipher machines in World War I and the advent of computers in World War II, cryptography methods have become increasingly complex and their applications more varied. Modern cryptography is heavily based on mathematical theory and computer science practice; cryptographic algorithms are designed around computational hardness assumptions, making such algorithms hard to break in actual practice by any adversary. While it is theoretically possible to break into a well-designed system, it is infeasible in actual practice to do so. Such schemes, if well designed, are therefore termed "computationally secure". Theoretical advances (e.g., improvements in integer factorization algorithms) and faster computing technology require these designs to be continually reevaluated and, if necessary, adapted.

Information-theoretically secure schemes that provably cannot be broken even with unlimited computing power, such as the one-time pad, are much more difficult to use in practice than the best theoretically breakable but computationally secure schemes. The growth of cryptographic technology has raised a number of legal issues in the Information Age. Cryptography's potential for use as a tool for espionage and sedition has led many governments to classify it as a weapon and to limit or even prohibit its use and export. In some jurisdictions where the use of cryptography is legal, laws permit investigators to compel the disclosure of encryption keys for documents relevant to an investigation. Cryptography also plays a major role in digital rights management and copyright infringement disputes with regard to digital media.

The first use of the term "cryptograph" (as opposed to "cryptogram") dates back to the 19th century – originating from "The Gold-Bug", a story by Edgar Allan Poe. The etymology of the term goes back to the Greek language; it is formed by two constituents: "crypton" (hidden), and "grapho" (to write). Until modern times, cryptography referred almost exclusively to "encryption", which is the process of converting ordinary information (called plaintext) into an unintelligible form (called ciphertext). Decryption is the reverse, in other words, moving from the unintelligible ciphertext back to plaintext. A cipher (or cypher) is a pair of algorithms that carry out the encryption and the reversing decryption. The detailed operation of a cipher is controlled both by the algorithm and, in each instance, by a "key". The key is a secret (ideally known only to the communicants), usually a string of characters (ideally short so it can be remembered by the user), which is needed to decrypt the ciphertext. In formal mathematical terms, a "cryptosystem" is the ordered list of elements of finite possible plaintexts, finite possible cyphertexts, finite possible keys, and the encryption and decryption algorithms that correspond to each key. Keys are important both formally and in actual practice, as ciphers without variable keys can be trivially broken with only the knowledge of the cipher used and are therefore useless (or even counter-productive) for most purposes. Historically, ciphers were often used directly for encryption or decryption without additional procedures such as authentication or integrity checks. There are two main types of cryptosystems: symmetric and asymmetric. In symmetric systems, the only ones known until the 1970s, the same secret key encrypts and decrypts a message. Data manipulation in symmetric systems is significantly faster than in asymmetric systems. Asymmetric systems use a "public key" to encrypt a message and a related "private key" to decrypt it.

The advantage of asymmetric systems is that the public key can be freely published, allowing parties to establish secure communication without having a shared secret key. In practice, asymmetric systems are used to first exchange a secret key, and then secure communication proceeds via a more efficient symmetric system using that key. Examples of asymmetric systems include Diffie–Hellman key exchange, RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman), ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography), and Post-quantum cryptography. Secure symmetric algorithms include the commonly used AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) which replaced the older DES (Data Encryption Standard). Insecure symmetric algorithms include children's language tangling schemes such as Pig Latin or other cant, and all historical cryptographic schemes, however seriously intended, prior to the invention of the one-time pad early in the 20th century. In colloquial use, the term "code" is often used to mean any method of encryption or concealment of meaning. However, in cryptography, code has a more specific meaning: the replacement of a unit of plaintext (i.e., a meaningful word or phrase) with a code word (for example, "wallaby" replaces "attack at dawn"). A cypher, in contrast, is a scheme for changing or substituting an element below such a level (a letter, a syllable, or a pair of letters, etc.) to produce a cyphertext. Cryptanalysis is the term used for the study of methods for obtaining the meaning of encrypted information without access to the key normally required to do so; i.e., it is the study of how to "crack" encryption algorithms or their implementations. Some use the terms "cryptography" and "cryptology" interchangeably in English, while others (including US military practice generally) use "cryptography" to refer specifically to the use and practice of cryptographic techniques and "cryptology" to refer to the combined study of cryptography and cryptanalysis. English is more flexible than several other languages in which "cryptology" (done by cryptologists) is always used in the second sense above.

RFC 2828 advises that steganography is sometimes included in cryptology. The study of characteristics of languages that have some application in cryptography or cryptology (e.g. frequency data, letter combinations, universal patterns, etc.) is called cryptolinguistics. Cryptolingusitics is especially used in military intelligence applications for deciphering foreign communications.

Before the modern era, cryptography focused on message confidentiality (i.e., encryption)—conversion of messages from a comprehensible form into an incomprehensible one and back again at the other end, rendering it unreadable by interceptors or eavesdroppers without secret knowledge (namely the key needed for decryption of that message). Encryption attempted to ensure secrecy in communication, such as those of spies, military leaders, and diplomats. In recent decades, the field has expanded beyond confidentiality concerns to include techniques for message integrity checking, sender/receiver identity authentication, digital signatures, interactive proofs and secure computation, among others.

2. System Architecture & Core Working Principles The main classical cipher types are transposition ciphers, which rearrange the order of letters in a message (e.g., 'hello world' becomes 'ehlol owrdl' in a trivially simple rearrangement scheme), and substitution ciphers, which systematically replace letters or groups of letters with other letters or groups of letters (e.g., 'fly at once' becomes 'gmz bu podf' by replacing each letter with the one following it in the Latin alphabet). Simple versions of either have never offered much confidentiality from enterprising opponents. An early substitution cipher was the Caesar cipher, in which each letter in the plaintext was replaced by a letter three positions further down the alphabet. Suetonius reports that Julius Caesar used it with a shift of three to communicate with his generals. Atbash is an example of an early Hebrew cipher. The earliest known use of cryptography is some carved ciphertext on stone in Egypt (c. 1900 BCE), but this may have been done for the amusement of literate observers rather than as a way of concealing information. The Greeks of Classical times are said to have known of ciphers (e.g., the scytale transposition cipher claimed to have been used by the Spartan military). Steganography (i.e., hiding even the existence of a message so as to keep it confidential) was also first developed in ancient times. An early example, from Herodotus, was a message tattooed on a slave's shaved head and concealed under the regrown hair. Other steganography methods involve 'hiding in plain sight,' such as using a music cipher to disguise an encrypted message within a regular piece of sheet music. More modern examples of steganography include the use of invisible ink, microdots, and digital watermarks to conceal information. In India, the 2000-year-old Kama Sutra of VItsyIyana speaks of two different kinds of ciphers called Kautiliyam and Mulavediya. In the Kautiliyam, the cipher letter substitutions are based on phonetic relations, such as vowels becoming consonants. In the Mulavediya, the cipher alphabet consists of pairing letters and using the reciprocal ones. In Sassanid Persia, there were two secret scripts, according to the Muslim author Ibn al-Nadim: the šIh-dabIrIya (literally "King's script") which was used for official correspondence, and the rIz-saharIya which was used to communicate secret messages with other countries. David Kahn notes in The Codebreakers that modern cryptology originated among the Arabs, the first people to systematically document cryptanalytic methods. Al-Khalil (717–786) wrote the Book of Cryptographic Messages, which contains the first use of permutations and combinations to list all possible Arabic words with and without vowels.

Ciphertexts produced by a classical cipher (and some modern ciphers) will reveal statistical information about the plaintext, and that information can often be used to break the cipher. After the discovery of frequency analysis, nearly all such ciphers could be broken by an informed attacker. Such classical ciphers still enjoy popularity today, though mostly as puzzles (see cryptogram). The Arab mathematician and polymath Al-Kindi wrote a book on cryptography entitled Risalah fi Istikhraj al-Mu'amma (Manuscript for the Deciphering Cryptographic Messages), which described the first known use of frequency analysis cryptanalysis techniques.

Language letter frequencies may offer little help for some extended historical encryption techniques such as homophonic cipher that tend to flatten the frequency distribution. For those ciphers, language letter group (or n-gram) frequencies may provide an attack. Essentially all ciphers remained vulnerable to cryptanalysis using the frequency analysis technique until the development of the polyalphabetic cipher, most clearly by Leon Battista Alberti around the year 1467, though there is some indication that it was already known to Al-Kindi. Alberti's innovation was to use different ciphers (i.e., substitution alphabets) for various parts of a message (perhaps for each successive plaintext letter at the limit). He also invented what was probably the first automatic cipher device, a wheel that implemented a partial realization of his invention. In the Vigenère cipher, a polyalphabetic cipher, encryption uses a key word, which controls letter substitution depending on which letter of the key word is used. In the mid-19th century Charles Babbage showed that the Vigenère cipher was vulnerable to Kasiski examination, but this was first published about ten years later by Friedrich Kasiski. Although frequency analysis can be a powerful and general technique against many ciphers, encryption has still often been effective in practice, as many a would-be cryptanalyst was unaware of the technique. Breaking a message without using frequency analysis essentially required knowledge of the cipher used and perhaps of the key involved, thus making espionage, bribery, burglary, defection, etc., more attractive approaches to the cryptanalytically uninformed. It was finally explicitly recognized in the 19th century that secrecy of a cipher's algorithm is not a sensible nor practical safeguard of message security; in fact, it was further realized that any adequate cryptographic scheme (including ciphers) should remain secure even if the adversary fully understands the cipher algorithm itself. Security of the key used should alone be sufficient for a good cipher to maintain confidentiality under an attack. This fundamental principle was first explicitly stated in 1883 by Auguste Kerckhoffs and is generally called Kerckhoffs's Principle; alternatively and more bluntly, it was restated by Claude Shannon, the inventor of information theory and the fundamentals of theoretical cryptography, as Shannon's Maxim—'the enemy knows the system'. Different physical devices and aids have been used to assist with ciphers. One of the earliest may have been the scytale of ancient Greece, a rod supposedly used by the Spartans as an aid for a transposition cipher. In medieval times, other aids were invented such as the cipher grille, which was also used for a kind of steganography. With the invention of polyalphabetic ciphers came more sophisticated aids such as Alberti's own cipher disk, Johannes Trithemius' tabula recta scheme, and Thomas Jefferson's wheel cypher (not publicly known, and reinvented independently by Bazeries around 1900). Many mechanical encryption/decryption devices were invented early in the 20th century, and several patented, among them rotor machines—famously including the Enigma machine used by the German government and military from the late 1920s and during World War II. The ciphers implemented by better quality examples of these machine designs brought about a substantial increase in cryptanalytic difficulty after WWI.

Symmetric-key cryptography refers to encryption methods in which both the sender and receiver share the same key (or, less commonly, in which their keys are different, but related in an easily computable way). This was the only kind of encryption publicly known until June 1976. Figure 2: Figure 1 from A Blockchain- Based Copyright Protection System for Short ...

Symmetric key ciphers are implemented as either block ciphers or stream ciphers. A block cipher enciphers input in blocks of plaintext as opposed to individual characters, the input form used by a stream cipher. The Data Encryption Standard (DES) and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) are block cipher designs that have been designated cryptography standards by the US government (though DES's designation was finally withdrawn after the AES was adopted). Despite its deprecation as an official standard, DES (especially its still-approved and much more secure triple-DES variant) remains quite popular; it is used across a wide range of applications, from ATM encryption to e-mail privacy and secure remote access. Many other block ciphers have been designed and released, with considerable variation in quality. Many, even some designed by capable practitioners, have been thoroughly broken, such as FEAL. Stream ciphers, in contrast to the 'block' type, create an arbitrarily long stream of key material, which is combined with the plaintext bit-by-bit or character-by-character, somewhat like the one-time pad. In a stream cipher, the output stream is created based on a hidden internal state that changes as the cipher operates. That internal state is initially set up using the secret key material. RC4 is a widely used stream cipher. Block ciphers can be used as stream ciphers by generating blocks of a keystream (in place of a Pseudorandom number generator) and applying an XOR operation to each bit of the plaintext with each bit of the keystream. Message authentication codes (MACs) are much like cryptographic hash functions, except that a secret key can be used to authenticate the hash value upon receipt; this additional complication blocks an attack scheme against bare digest algorithms, and so has been thought worth the effort.

Cryptographic hash functions are a third type of cryptographic algorithm. They take a message of any length as input, and output a short, fixed-length hash, which can be used in (for example) a digital signature. For good hash functions, an attacker cannot find two messages that produce the same hash. MD4 is a long-used hash function that is now broken; MD5, a strengthened variant of MD4, is also widely used but broken in practice. The US National Security Agency developed the Secure Hash Algorithm series of MD5-like hash functions: SHA-0 was a flawed algorithm that the agency withdrew; SHA-1 is widely deployed and more secure than MD5, but cryptanalysts have identified attacks against it; the SHA-2 family improves on SHA-1, but is vulnerable to clashes as of 2011; and the US standards authority thought it "prudent" from a security perspective to develop a new standard to "significantly improve the robustness of NIST's overall hash algorithm toolkit." Thus, a hash function design competition was meant to select a new U.S. national standard, to be called SHA-3, by 2012. The competition ended on October 2, 2012, when the NIST announced that Keccak would be the new SHA-3 hash algorithm.

Unlike block and stream ciphers that are invertible, cryptographic hash functions produce a hashed output that cannot be used to retrieve the original input data. Cryptographic hash functions are used to verify the authenticity of data retrieved from an untrusted source or to add a layer of security. Symmetric-key cryptosystems use the same key for encryption and decryption of a message, although a message or group of messages can have a different key than others. A significant disadvantage of symmetric ciphers is the key management necessary to use them securely. Each distinct pair of communicating parties must, ideally, share a different key, and perhaps for each ciphertext exchanged as well. The number of keys required increases as the square of the number of network members, which very quickly requires complex key management schemes to keep them all consistent and secret.

In a groundbreaking 1976 paper, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman proposed the notion of public-key (also, more generally, called asymmetric key) cryptography in which two different but mathematically related keys are used—a public key and a private key. A public key system is so constructed that calculation of one key (the 'private key') is computationally infeasible from the other (the 'public key'), even though they are necessarily related. Instead, both keys are generated secretly, as an interrelated pair. The historian David Kahn described public-key cryptography as "the most revolutionary new concept in the field since polyalphabetic substitution emerged in the Renaissance". In public-key cryptosystems, the public key may be freely distributed, while its paired private key must remain secret. The public key is used for encryption, while the private or secret key is used for decryption. While Diffie and Hellman could not find such a system, they showed that public-key cryptography was indeed possible by presenting the Diffie–Hellman key exchange protocol, a solution that is now widely used in secure communications to allow two parties to secretly agree on a shared encryption key. The X.509 standard defines the most commonly used format for public key certificates. Diffie and Hellman's publication sparked widespread academic efforts in finding a practical public-key encryption system. This race was finally won in 1978 by Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman, whose solution has since become known as the RSA algorithm. The Diffie–Hellman and RSA algorithms, in addition to being the first publicly known examples of high-quality public-key algorithms, have been among the most widely used.

Other asymmetric-key algorithms include the Cramer–Shoup cryptosystem, ElGamal encryption, and various elliptic curve techniques. A document published in 1997 by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a British intelligence organization, revealed that cryptographers at GCHQ had anticipated several academic developments. Reportedly, around 1970, James H. Ellis had conceived the principles of asymmetric key cryptography. In 1973, Clifford Cocks invented a solution that was very similar in design rationale to RSA. In 1974, Malcolm J. Williamson is claimed to have developed the Diffie–Hellman key exchange.

3. Software Implementation, Frameworks & Protocols Public-key cryptography is also used for implementing digital signature schemes. A digital signature is reminiscent of an ordinary signature; they both have the characteristic of being easy for a user to produce, but difficult for anyone else to forge. Digital signatures can also be permanently tied to the content of the message being signed; they cannot then be 'moved' from one document to another, for any attempt will be detectable. In digital signature schemes, there are two algorithms: one for signing, in which a secret key is used to process the message (or a hash of the message, or both), and one for verification, in which the matching public key is used with the message to check the validity of the signature. RSA and DSA are two of the most popular digital signature schemes. Digital signatures are central to the operation of public key infrastructures and many network security schemes (e.g., SSL/TLS, many VPNs, etc.). Public-key algorithms are most often based on the computational complexity of "hard" problems, often from number theory. For example, the hardness of RSA is related to the integer factorization problem, while Diffie–Hellman and DSA are related to the discrete logarithm problem. The security of elliptic curve cryptography is based on number theoretic problems involving elliptic curves. Because of the difficulty of the underlying problems, most public-key algorithms involve operations such as modular multiplication and exponentiation, which are much more computationally expensive than the techniques used in most block ciphers, especially with typical key sizes.

As a result, public-key cryptosystems are commonly hybrid cryptosystems, in which a fast high-quality symmetric-key encryption algorithm is used for the message itself, while the relevant symmetric key is sent with the message, but encrypted using a public-key algorithm. Similarly, hybrid signature schemes are often used, in which a cryptographic hash function is computed, and only the resulting hash is digitally signed.

Cryptographic hash functions are functions that take a variable-length input and return a fixed-length output, which can be used in, for example, a digital signature. For a hash function to be secure, it must be difficult to compute two inputs that hash to the same value (collision resistance) and to compute an input that hashes to a given output (preimage resistance). MD4 is a long-used hash function that is now broken; MD5, a strengthened variant of MD4, is also widely used but broken in practice.

The US National Security Agency developed the Secure Hash Algorithm series of MD5-like hash functions: SHA-0 was a flawed algorithm that the agency withdrew; SHA-1 is widely deployed and more secure than MD5, but cryptanalysts have identified attacks against it; the SHA-2 family improves on SHA-1, but is vulnerable to clashes as of 2011; and the US standards authority thought it "prudent" from a security perspective to develop a new standard to "significantly improve the robustness of NIST's overall hash algorithm toolkit." Thus, a hash function design competition was meant to select a new U.S.

national standard, to be called SHA-3, by 2012. The competition ended on October 2, 2012, when the NIST announced that Keccak would be the new SHA-3 hash algorithm. Unlike block and stream ciphers that are invertible, cryptographic hash functions produce a hashed output that cannot be used to retrieve the original input data. Cryptographic hash functions are used to verify the authenticity of data retrieved from an untrusted source or to add a layer of security.

The goal of cryptanalysis is to find some weakness or insecurity in a cryptographic scheme, thus permitting its subversion or evasion. It is a common misconception that every encryption method can be broken. In connection with his WWII work at Bell Labs, Claude Shannon proved that the one-time pad cipher is unbreakable, provided the key material is truly random, never reused, kept secret from all possible attackers, and of equal or greater length than the message. Most ciphers, apart from the one-time pad, can be broken with enough computational effort by brute force attack, but the amount of effort needed may be exponentially dependent on the key size, as compared to the effort needed to make use of the cipher. In such cases, effective security could be achieved if it is proven that the effort required (i.e., "work factor", in Shannon's terms) is beyond the ability of any adversary. This means it must be shown that no efficient method (as opposed to the time-consuming brute force method) can be found to break the cipher. Since no such proof has been found to date, the one-time-pad remains the only theoretically unbreakable cipher. Although well-implemented one-time-pad encryption cannot be broken, traffic analysis is still possible.

There are a wide variety of cryptanalytic attacks, and they can be classified in any of several ways. A common distinction turns on what Eve (an attacker) knows and what capabilities are available. In a ciphertext-only attack, Eve has access only to the ciphertext (good modern cryptosystems are usually effectively immune to ciphertext-only attacks). In a known-plaintext attack, Eve has access to a ciphertext and its corresponding plaintext (or to many such pairs). In a chosen-plaintext attack, Eve may choose a plaintext and learn its corresponding ciphertext (perhaps many times); an example is gardening, used by the British during WWII. In a chosen-ciphertext attack, Eve may be able to choose ciphertexts and learn their corresponding plaintexts. Finally in a man-in-the-middle attack Eve gets in between Alice (the sender) and Bob (the recipient), accesses and modifies the traffic and then forward it to the recipient. Also important, often overwhelmingly so, are mistakes (generally in the design or use of one of the protocols involved). Cryptanalysis of symmetric-key ciphers typically involves looking for attacks against the block ciphers or stream ciphers that are more efficient than any attack that could be against a perfect cipher. For example, a simple brute force attack against DES requires one known plaintext and 255 decryptions, trying approximately half of the possible keys, to reach a point at which chances are better than even that the key sought will have been found. But this may not be enough assurance; a linear cryptanalysis attack against DES requires 243 known plaintexts (with their corresponding ciphertexts) and approximately 243 DES operations. This is a considerable improvement over brute force attacks. Public-key algorithms are based on the computational difficulty of various problems. The most famous of these are the difficulty of integer factorization of semiprimes and the difficulty of calculating discrete logarithms, both of which are not yet proven to be solvable in polynomial time (P) using only a classical Turing-complete computer. Much public-key cryptanalysis concerns designing algorithms in P that can solve these problems, or using other technologies, such as quantum computers.

For instance, the best-known algorithms for solving the elliptic curve-based version of discrete logarithm are much more time-consuming than the best-known algorithms for factoring, at least for problems of more or less equivalent size. Thus, to achieve an equivalent strength of encryption, techniques that depend upon the difficulty of factoring large composite numbers, such as the RSA cryptosystem, require larger keys than elliptic curve techniques. For this reason, public-key cryptosystems based on elliptic curves have become popular since their invention in the mid-1990s. While pure cryptanalysis uses weaknesses in the algorithms themselves, other attacks on cryptosystems are based on actual use of the algorithms in real devices, and are called side-channel attacks. If a cryptanalyst has access to, for example, the amount of time the device took to encrypt a number of plaintexts or report an error in a password or PIN character, they may be able to use a timing attack to break a cipher that is otherwise resistant to analysis. An attacker might also study the pattern and length of messages to derive valuable information; this is known as traffic analysis and can be quite useful to an alert adversary. Poor administration of a cryptosystem, such as permitting too short keys, will make any system vulnerable, regardless of other virtues. Social engineering and other attacks against humans (e.g., bribery, extortion, blackmail, espionage, rubber-hose cryptanalysis or torture) are usually employed due to being more cost-effective and feasible to perform in a reasonable amount of time compared to pure cryptanalysis by a high margin.

One or more cryptographic primitives are often used to develop a more complex algorithm, called a cryptographic system, or cryptosystem. Cryptosystems (e.g., El-Gamal encryption) are designed to provide particular functionality (e.g., public key encryption) while guaranteeing certain security properties (e.g., chosen-plaintext attack (CPA) security in the random oracle model). Cryptosystems use the properties of the underlying cryptographic primitives to support the system's security properties. As the distinction between primitives and cryptosystems is somewhat arbitrary, a sophisticated cryptosystem can be derived from a combination of several more primitive cryptosystems. In many cases, the cryptosystem's structure involves back and forth communication among two or more parties in space (e.g., between the sender of a secure message and its receiver) or across time (e.g., cryptographically protected backup data). Such cryptosystems are sometimes called cryptographic protocols. Some widely known cryptosystems include RSA, Schnorr signature, ElGamal encryption, and Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). More complex cryptosystems include electronic cash systems, signcryption systems, etc. Some more 'theoretical' cryptosystems include interactive proof systems, (like zero-knowledge proofs) and systems for secret sharing.

Figure 3: A Blockchain Copyright Protection Scheme Based on CP-ABE Scheme with ... Cryptography is widely used on the internet to help protect user-data and prevent eavesdropping. To ensure secrecy during transmission, many systems use private key cryptography to protect transmitted information. With public-key systems, one can maintain secrecy without a master key or a large number of keys. But, some algorithms like BitLocker and VeraCrypt are generally not private-public key cryptography. For example, Veracrypt uses a password hash to generate the single private key. However, it can be configured to run in public-private key systems. The C++ opensource encryption library OpenSSL provides free and opensource encryption software and tools. The most commonly used encryption cipher suit is AES, as it has hardware acceleration for all x86 based processors that has AES-NI. A close contender is ChaCha20-Poly1305, which is a stream cipher, however it is commonly used for mobile devices as they are ARM based which does not feature AES-NI instruction set extension.

Cryptography can be used to secure communications by encrypting them. Websites use encryption via HTTPS. "End-to-end" encryption, where only sender and receiver can read messages, is implemented for email in Pretty Good Privacy and for secure messaging in general in WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram. Operating systems use encryption to keep passwords secret, conceal parts of the system, and ensure that software updates are truly from the system maker. Instead of storing plaintext passwords, computer systems store hashes thereof; then, when a user logs in, the system passes the given password through a cryptographic hash function and compares it to the hashed value on file. In this manner, neither the system nor an attacker has at any point access to the password in plaintext. Encryption is sometimes used to encrypt one's entire drive. For example, University College London has implemented BitLocker (a program by Microsoft) to render drive data opaque without users logging in.

In the 1990s, there were several challenges to US export regulation of cryptography. After the source code for Philip Zimmermann's Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption program found its way onto the Internet in June 1991, a complaint by RSA Security (then called RSA Data Security, Inc.) resulted in a lengthy criminal investigation of Zimmermann by the US Customs Service and the FBI, though no charges were ever filed. Daniel J. Bernstein, then a graduate student at UC Berkeley, brought a lawsuit against the US government challenging some aspects of the restrictions based on free speech grounds. The 1995 case Bernstein v. United States ultimately resulted in a 1999 decision that printed source code for cryptographic algorithms and systems was protected as free speech by the United States Constitution. In 1996, thirty-nine countries signed the Wassenaar Arrangement, an arms control treaty that deals with the export of arms and "dual-use" technologies such as cryptography. The treaty stipulated that the use of cryptography with short key-lengths (56-bit for symmetric encryption, 512-bit for RSA) would no longer be export-controlled. Cryptography exports from the US became less strictly regulated as a consequence of a major relaxation in 2000; there are no longer very many restrictions on key sizes in US-exported mass-market software. Since this relaxation in US export restrictions, and because most personal computers connected to the Internet include US-sourced web browsers such as Firefox or Internet Explorer, almost every Internet user worldwide has potential access to quality cryptography via their browsers (e.g., via Transport Layer Security). The Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook E-mail client programs similarly can transmit and receive emails via TLS, and can send and receive email encrypted with S/MIME. Many Internet users do not realize that their basic application software contains such extensive cryptosystems. These browsers and email programs are so ubiquitous that even governments whose intent is to regulate civilian use of cryptography generally do not find it practical to do much to control distribution or use of cryptography of this quality, so even when such laws are in force, actual enforcement is often effectively impossible.

4. Practical Deployment, Analysis & Case Studies Another contentious issue connected to cryptography in the United States is the influence of the National Security Agency on cipher development and policy. The NSA was involved with the design of DES during its development at IBM and its consideration by the National Bureau of Standards as a possible Federal Standard for cryptography. DES was designed to be resistant to differential cryptanalysis, a powerful and general cryptanalytic technique known to the NSA and IBM, that became publicly known only when it was rediscovered in the late 1980s. According to Steven Levy, IBM discovered differential cryptanalysis, but kept the technique secret at the NSA's request. The technique became publicly known only when Biham and Shamir re-discovered and announced it some years later. The entire affair illustrates the difficulty of determining what resources and knowledge an attacker might actually have. Another instance of the NSA's involvement was the 1993 Clipper chip affair, an encryption microchip intended to be part of the Capstone cryptography-control initiative. Clipper was widely criticized by cryptographers for two reasons. The cipher algorithm (called Skipjack) was then classified (declassified in 1998, long after the Clipper initiative lapsed). The classified cipher caused concerns that the NSA had deliberately made the cipher weak to assist its intelligence efforts. The whole initiative was also criticized based on its violation of Kerckhoffs's Principle, as the scheme included a special escrow key held by the government for use by law enforcement (i.e. wiretapping).

Cryptography is central to digital rights management (DRM), a group of techniques for technologically controlling use of copyrighted material, being widely implemented and deployed at the behest of some copyright holders. In 1998, U.S. President Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which criminalized all production, dissemination, and use of certain cryptanalytic techniques and technology (now known or later discovered); specifically, those that could be used to circumvent DRM technological schemes. This had a noticeable impact on the cryptography research community since an argument can be made that any cryptanalytic research violated the DMCA. Similar statutes have since been enacted in several countries and regions, including the implementation in the EU Copyright Directive. Similar restrictions are called for by treaties signed by World Intellectual Property Organization member-states. The United States Department of Justice and FBI have not enforced the DMCA as rigorously as had been feared by some, but the law, nonetheless, remains a controversial one. Niels Ferguson, a well-respected cryptography researcher, has publicly stated that he will not release some of his research into an Intel security design for fear of prosecution under the DMCA. Cryptologist Bruce Schneier has argued that the DMCA encourages vendor lock-in, while inhibiting actual measures toward cyber-security. Both Alan Cox (longtime Linux kernel developer) and Edward Felten (and some of his students at Princeton) have encountered problems related to the Act.

Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested during a visit to the US from Russia, and jailed for five months pending trial for alleged violations of the DMCA arising from work he had done in Russia, where the work was legal. In 2007, the cryptographic keys responsible for Blu-ray and HD DVD content scrambling were discovered and released onto the Internet. In both cases, the Motion Picture Association of America sent out numerous DMCA takedown notices, and there was a massive Internet backlash triggered by the perceived impact of such notices on fair use and free speech.

In the United Kingdom, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act gives UK police the powers to force suspects to decrypt files or hand over passwords that protect encryption keys. Failure to comply is an offense in its own right, punishable on conviction by a two-year jail sentence or up to five years in cases involving national security. Successful prosecutions have occurred under the Act; the first, in 2009, resulted in a term of 13 months' imprisonment. Similar forced disclosure laws in Australia, Finland, France, and India compel individual suspects under investigation to hand over encryption keys or passwords during a criminal investigation. In the United States, the federal criminal case of United States v. Fricosu addressed whether a search warrant can compel a person to reveal an encryption passphrase or password. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argued that this is a violation of the protection from self-incrimination given by the Fifth Amendment. In 2012, the court ruled that under the All Writs Act, the defendant was required to produce an unencrypted hard drive for the court. In many jurisdictions, the legal status of forced disclosure remains unclear. The 2016 FBI–Apple encryption dispute concerns the ability of courts in the United States to compel manufacturers' assistance in unlocking cell phones whose contents are cryptographically protected. As a potential counter-measure to forced disclosure some cryptographic software supports plausible deniability, where the encrypted data is indistinguishable from unused random data (for example such as that of a drive which has been securely wiped).

The dictionary definition of cryptography at Wiktionary Media related to Cryptography at Wikimedia Commons Cryptography on In Our Time at the BBC Crypto Glossary and Dictionary of Technical Cryptography Archived 4 July 2022 at the Wayback Machine A Course in Cryptography by Raphael Pass & Abhi Shelat – offered at Cornell in the form of lecture notes. For more on the use of cryptographic elements in fiction, see: Dooley, John F. (23 August 2012). "Cryptology in Fiction". Archived from the original on 29 July 2020. Retrieved 20 February 2015. The George Fabyan Collection at the Library of Congress has early editions of works of seventeenth-century English literature, publications relating to cryptography.

Benoît Laliberté (born July 18, 1972) is a Canadian entrepreneur, inventor and is currently the CEO of Investel Capital Corporation and United American Corp. He is the founder of JITEC, Vectoria Inc., TeliPhone Corp., the New York Telecom Exchange Inc and Teliphone Navigata-Westel. Laliberté’s personal net worth was estimated at more than C$345 million. In 2016, Laliberté’s iFramed patent portfolio was appraised at approximately US$1 billion by TechInsights, a Silicon Valley patent analysis firm. Earlier in his career, Laliberté gained some notoriety in Canada and in Quebec with JITEC. In July 2000, JITEC was listed on the Montreal Exchange following an initial public offering during the height of the technology market expansion a public company which at its peak in 2000 had an estimated value of $CDN575 million. In a 2000 interview, Benoit Laliberte stated that JITEC was “provoking a revolution in the way people do computing,” At a time when the term “cloud computing” had not yet entered mainstream use, JITEC’s approach anticipated what would later become widely known as cloud-based infrastructure and managed services. The company’s early emphasis on remote management, shared resources, and subscription-style access positioned it as a precursor to the cloud computing model that would emerge in the following decade. In later years, Laliberté became involved in telecommunications ventures and patent development through Investel Capital Corporation. In 2016, Investel filed patent litigation against Snapchat in United States district court of Los Angeles and in Federal Court of Canada relating to Geofence geofiltering technology. More recently, he invented several technologies in telecommunications, social media, and information technology (IT).

In October 2003, Laliberté filed a civil lawsuit against brokerage firm Canaccord Genuity seeking damages related to transactions during the JITEC period. In November 2003, Laliberté launched a major lawsuit against the QSC, alleging abusive and reckless conduct during the investigation. The action was described as a $117-million claim against the regulator, one of the largest suits of its kind filed in Quebec securities history. Laliberté sought damages exceeding $100 million in relation to the collapse of JITEC’s market value.

Following the initiation of statute proceedings by the Autorité des marchés financiers (Quebec) (AMF) in 2004, formal charges alleging violations of Quebec securities legislation proceeded through the courts. In 2007, Laliberté’s trial opened, focusing on allegations that certain public disclosures and trading-related communications during the JITEC period were misleading. Prosecutors alleged Laliberté had promoted contracts and commercial arrangements that regulators argued did not materialize as publicly presented. Testimony related to corporate announcements issued during the rapid rise of JITEC’s stock price in 2000. In November 2007, courtroom exchanges included Laliberté denying wrongdoing and attributing the collapse of the company’s share price in part to external market pressures and actions by critics. On February 22, 2008, Laliberté was found guilty on multiple securities-related counts. The court concluded that certain public statements made during the 2000 period constituted violations of Quebec securities law. The verdict was described as one of the most prominent securities convictions arising from Quebec’s technology boom era. In August 2008, Laliberté was fined approximately C$900,000 in connection with the convictions. The AMF had initially sought penalties totaling approximately C$1.2 million. In May 2009, Laliberté was found guilty on three additional counts connected to the JITEC matter. The proceedings extended over several years and involved numerous counts relating to securities infractions. He was found guilty of stock market manipulation in 2008.In September 2010, a court ordered Laliberté to pay increased financial penalties as part of enforcement actions arising from the convictions.

5. Performance Evaluation & Extended Technical Observations In 2017, TNW Wireless Inc., a company controlled by Investel Capital Corporation and previously known as RuralCom Corporation, applied to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) for mandated wholesale mobile wireless roaming agreements from Bell Mobility Inc. and TELUS Communications Inc. pursuant to the Commission’s wholesale wireless framework. TNW indicated that it intended to operate as a facilities-based wireless carrier and proposed to offer two services: a traditional mobile wireless service and an Internet Personal Communications System (iPCS), described as a Wi-Fi-based smartphone-over-IP service. In Telecom Decision CRTC 2019-56, issued 28 February 2019, the Commission determined that TNW had demonstrated ownership of spectrum licences transferred from RuralCom and operation of a core network and radio access network (RAN) in British Columbia and Yukon.

Beginning in 2018, Laliberté became involved in Bitcoin mining operations through entities associated with blockchain infrastructure development. Dome-shaped structures housing cryptocurrency mining equipment were installed on agricultural land in Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, Quebec. The installations were described as data-processing facilities designed to support high-capacity digital asset mining operations. The project relied on access to significant electrical capacity and was situated on land zoned for agricultural use. According to Data Center Dynamics, the Blockchain Dome campus used a passive cooling system in which outside air was drawn through underground tunnels, cooled through thermal exchange, and then directed toward the computing equipment. The same report also stated that related expansion plans contemplated the reuse of waste heat from the mining and data-processing operations to support adjacent greenhouse facilities.

In the dynamic realm of digital content, safeguarding intellectual property rights poses critical challenges. This paper presents "SecureRights," an innovative Blockchain-based Trusted Digital Rights Management (DRM) framework. It strengthens the defence against unauthorized use and streamlines the claim of digital rights. Utilizing blockchain, digital watermarking, perceptual hashing, Quick Response (QR) codes, and the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), SecureRights securely stores watermark information on the blockchain with timestamp authentication. Incorporating perceptual hashing generates robust hash tokens based on image structure. The addition of QR codes enhances the watermarking, offering a comprehensive solution for resilient intellectual property rights protection. Rigorous evaluations affirm SecureRights’ resilience against various attacks, establishing its efficacy in safeguarding digital content and simplifying rightful ownership assertion.

In the rapidly evolving digital technology landscape, the exponential proliferation of multimedia and digital content on the internet has become a defining characteristic of the contemporary era. Digital images, artworks, soundtracks, and videos, once confined to traditional forms of dissemination, now inundate online platforms, facilitating unprecedented levels of sharing and accessibility for creators and consumers alike. However, this digital revolution has engendered a critical conundrum: the inherent vulnerability of digital content to unauthorized manipulation, reproduction, and distribution. The seamless nature of these processes poses a formidable risk to preserving intellectual property rights and information integrity, as malevolent actors exploit these vulnerabilities to infringe upon the legitimate rights of copyright holders and assert wrongful ownership.

In response to these challenges, legislative and regulatory bodies have introduced rules, patents, and licensing frameworks to safeguard digital content creators’ ownership and intellectual property rights. Despite these efforts, the efficacy of such measures remains limited, necessitating innovative solutions to address the ever-expanding scope and intricacies of digital content protection. One such solution that has garnered attention is the concept of Digital Watermarking, initially proposed to protect the copyrights of electronic documents and subsequently extended to shield software copyrights by embedding watermarks within various data structures ( 6 ) . However, digital watermarks are vulnerable to subtract attacks because the attacker can delete the embedded digital watermark content from the data structure without affecting the functionality.

Within the realm of watermarking solutions, the semi-fragile watermarking scheme stands out as a prominent choice, involving the embedding of watermark(s) within the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) domain. By embedding watermarks in the quantized DWT domain, this approach yields a robust scheme resilient to JPEG compression exceeding 50% Quality Factor (QF) and achieves a minimum 32×32 detection unit ( 9 ) . Moreover, it offers the possibility of inserting a signature extracted from the original image into the DWT domain. However, this signature proves less robust in the face of image processing and JPEG compression below 60% QF ( 18 ) . Discriminating between malicious and non-malicious attacks can be facilitated by integrating the Just Noticeable Differences (JND) feature into the embedding scheme ( 7 ) . Extracting image features from the low-frequency domain to generate two watermarks enables the classification of intentional content modifications and indicates modification locations. However, this approach is less robust to JPEG compression below 50% QF ( 5 ) . Zernike moments in the DWT domain serve as robust features for authentication tasks, particularly effective against JPEG compression above 50% QF and achieving a 32×32 detection unit ( 12 ) . Additionally, embedding inter-block and intra-block signatures in the DWT domain using a block-mean-based quantization scheme proves robust against JPEG compression exceeding 60% QF ( 19 ) . Despite the considerable volume of research devoted to safeguarding digital rights using digital watermarking techniques, a comprehensive framework for protecting and asserting digital copyrights remains notably absent.

The proposed approach addresses this critical gap by proposing an innovative blockchain-based digital rights management system. By seamlessly integrating digital watermarking, blockchain technology, perceptual hashing, Quick Response (QR) codes, and the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), this system establishes a comprehensive platform for robust intellectual property (IP) rights protection. One of the primary challenges it tackles is the vulnerability of digital content to copyright violations, including unauthorized editing, misuse, and distribution. Through secure storage of watermark information on the blockchain and provision of timestamp authentication for multiple watermarks, the proposed system ensures a resilient defence against such violations. Moreover, the system enhances its watermarking capabilities by leveraging perceptual hashing to generate hash tokens based on structural image information and incorporating QR codes containing the image’s hash token and copyright message. Additionally, managing digital content and copyright information within the IPFS Network further strengthens its holistic approach to IP rights protection.

Harvested Online Documentation & Reference Sources • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital%20cloning • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beno%C3%AEt%20Lalibert%C3%A9 • https://arxiv.org/html/2403.06094v1