Ambient-aware authentication of digital evidences

Easy fragility of digital media content makes their authentication mandatory before they can be considered as legal evidence. The existing techniques usually perform authentication after the media content has been captured and stored on the disk; hence they can not guarantee the integrity of the media content since they can still be tampered with before performing the authentication process. In this paper, we propose a camera-level authentication scheme, which utilizes the ambient information such as date, time, GPS-based location, camera model, and serial number in addition to the captured media content in order to compute the authentication data. The proposed scheme uses a cryptographic secret sharing technique to ensure the integrity of the captured media content. The experimental results show the utility of our scheme.