This paper addresses the problems and threats associated with verification of integrity, proof of authenticity, tamper detection, and copyright protection for digital-text content. Such issues were largely addressed in the literature for images, audio, and video, with only a few papers addressing the challenge of sensitive plain-text media under known constraints. Specifically, with text as the predominant online communication medium, it becomes crucial that techniques are deployed to protect such information. A number of digital-signature, hashing, and watermarking schemes have been proposed that essentially bind source data or embed invisible data in a cover media to achieve its goal. While many such complex schemes with resource redundancies are sufficient in offline and less-sensitive texts, this paper proposes a hybrid approach based on zero-watermarking and digital-signature-like manipulations for sensitive text documents in order to achieve content originality and integrity verification without physically modifying the cover text in anyway. The proposed algorithm was implemented and shown to be robust against undetected content modifications and is capable of confirming proof of originality whilst detecting and locating deliberate/nondeliberate tampering. Additionally, enhancements in resource utilisation and reduced redundancies were achieved in comparison to traditional encryption-based approaches. Finally, analysis and remarks are made about the current state of the art, and future research issues are discussed under the given constraints.
Many authentication schemes have been proposed for telecare medicine information systems (TMIS) to ensure the privacy, integrity, and availability of patient records. These schemes are crucial for TMIS systems because otherwise patients' medical records become susceptible to tampering thus hampering diagnosis or private medical conditions of patients could be disclosed to parties who do not have a right to access such information. Very recently, Hao et al. proposed a chaotic map-based authentication scheme for telecare medicine information systems in a recent issue of Journal of Medical Systems. They claimed that the authentication scheme can withstand various attacks and it is secure to be used in TMIS. In this paper, we show that this authentication scheme is vulnerable to key-compromise impersonation attacks, off-line password guessing attacks upon compromising of a smart card, and parallel session attacks. We also exploit weaknesses in the password change phase of the scheme to mount a denial-of-service attack. Our results show that this scheme cannot be used to provide security in a telecare medicine information system.
The ever-growing numbers of medical digital images and the need to share them among specialists and hospitals for better and more accurate diagnosis require that patients' privacy be protected. As a result of this, there is a need for medical image watermarking (MIW). However, MIW needs to be performed with special care for two reasons. Firstly, the watermarking procedure cannot compromise the quality of the image. Secondly, confidential patient information embedded within the image should be flawlessly retrievable without risk of error after image decompressing. Despite extensive research undertaken in this area, there is still no method available to fulfill all the requirements of MIW. This paper aims to provide a useful survey on watermarking and offer a clear perspective for interested researchers by analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of different existing methods.