Paper 2019/295
Balancing Image Privacy and Usability with Thumbnail-Preserving Encryption
Kimia Tajik, Akshith Gunasekaran, Rhea Dutta, Brandon Ellis, Rakesh B. Bobba, Mike Rosulek, Charles V. Wright, and Wu-chi Feng
Abstract
In this paper, we motivate the need for image encryption techniques that preserve certain visual features in images and hide all other information, to balance privacy and usability in the context of cloud-based image storage services. In particular, we introduce the concept of ideal or exact Thumbnail-Preserving Encryption (TPE), a special case of format-preserving encryption, and present a concrete construction. In TPE, a ciphertext is itself an image that has the same thumbnail as the plaintext (unencrypted) image, but that provably leaks nothing about the plaintext beyond its thumbnail. We provide a formal security analysis for the construction, and a prototype implementation to demonstrate compatibility with existing services. We also study the ability of users to distinguish between thumbnail images preserved by TPE. Our findings indicate that TPE is an efficient and promising approach to balance usability and privacy concerns for images. Our code and a demo are available at http://photoencryption.org.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Applications
- Publication info
- Published elsewhere. Minor revision. NDSS 2019
- DOI
- 10.14722/ndss.2019.23432
- Keywords
- Thumbnail-preserving image encryptionFormat-preserving encryptionImage privacyUsability
- Contact author(s)
- tajikk @ oregonstate edu
- History
- 2019-03-20: received
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2019/295
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2019/295,
author = {Kimia Tajik and Akshith Gunasekaran and Rhea Dutta and Brandon Ellis and Rakesh B. Bobba and Mike Rosulek and Charles V. Wright and Wu-chi Feng},
title = {Balancing Image Privacy and Usability with Thumbnail-Preserving Encryption},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2019/295},
year = {2019},
doi = {10.14722/ndss.2019.23432},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/295}
}
