On Antiforensic Concealability With Rate-Distortion Tradeoff

A signal´s compression history is of particular forensic significance because it contains important information about the origin and authenticity of a signal. Because of this, antiforensic techniques have been developed that allow a forger to conceal manipulation fingerprints. However, when antiforensic techniques are applied to multimedia content, distortion may be introduced, or the data size may be increased. Furthermore, when compressing an antiforensically modified forgery, a tradeoff between the rate and distortion is introduced into the system. As a result, a forger must balance three factors, such as how much the fingerprints can be forensically concealed, the data rate, and the distortion, are interrelated to form a 3D tradeoff. In this paper, we characterize this tradeoff by defining concealability and using it to measure the effectiveness of an antiforensic attack. Then, to demonstrate this tradeoff in a realistic scenario, we examine the concealability-rate-distortion tradeoff in double JPEG compression antiforensics. To evaluate this tradeoff, we propose flexible antiforensic dither as an attack in which the forger can vary the strength of antiforensics. To reduce the time and computational complexity associated with decoding a JPEG file, applying antiforensics, and recompressing, we propose an antiforensic transcoder to efficiently complete these tasks in one step. Through simulation, two surprising results are revealed. One is that if a forger uses a lower quality factor in the second compression, applying antiforensics can both increase concealability and decrease the data rate. The other is that for any pairing of concealability and distortion values, achieved using a higher secondary quality factor, can also be achieved using a lower secondary quality factor at a lower data rate. As a result, the forger has an incentive to always recompress using a lower secondary quality factor.