AACI: The mechanism for approximate authentication and correction of images

Modification of images usually originates from channel noise, image processing operations or adversary´s efforts. Image authentication mechanisms protect the authenticity of images by differentiating between the effects of malicious and acceptable alterations in the original image. This paper introduces a mechanism for approximate authentication and correction of images (AACI). The proposed scheme is constructed based on two approximate message authentication code (AMAC) frameworks which use standard cryptographic primitives and error-correcting codes as their building blocks. The AACI tolerates acceptable modifications which are not effective in the image recovery process. The malicious modifications can be detected and the damaged parts can be restored by an AACI mechanism up to a certain limit. In this work, the specification of the AACI mechanism is given, proposed settings, performance and security analysis of the AACI are discussed and simulation results are presented.