Chin-Feng Lee

Two RFID-based Solutions to Enhance Inpatient Medication Safety

Owing to the low cost and convenience of identifying an object without physical contact, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems provide innovative, promising and efficient applications in many domains. An RFID grouping protocol is a protocol that allows an off-line verifier to collect and verify the evidence of two or more tags simultaneously present. Recently, Huang and Ku (J. Med. Syst, 2009) proposed an efficient grouping protocol to enhance medication safety for inpatients based on low-cost tags. However, the Huang–Ku scheme is not secure; an attacker can easily make up fake grouping records to cheat the verifier. This weakness would seriously endanger the safety of inpatient medication safety. This paper will show the weaknesses, and then propose two RFID-based solutions to enhance medication safety for two different scenarios. The proposed schemes are practical, secure and efficient for medication applications.

Embedding capacity raising in reversible data hiding based on prediction of difference expansion

Most of the proposed methods of reversible data hiding based on difference expansion require location maps to recover cover images. Although the location map can be compressed by a lossless compression algorithm, this lowers embedding capacity and increases computational cost during the procedures of embedding and extracting. The study presents an adaptive reversible data scheme based on the prediction of difference expansion. Since each cover pixel generally resembles its surrounding pixels, most of the difference values between the cover pixels and their corresponding predictive pixels are small; therefore, the proposed scheme gains from embedding capacity by taking full advantage of the large quantities of smaller difference values where secret data can be embedded. The proposed scheme offers several advantages, namely, (1) the location map is no more required, (2) the embedding capacity can be adjusted depending on the practical applications, and (3) the high embedding capacity with minimal visual distortion can be achieved. Moreover, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme yields high embedding capacity by comparing the related schemes that are proposed recently.

An efficient image interpolation increasing payload in reversible data hiding

Image interpolation is a very important branch in image processing. It is widely used in imaging world, for example, image interpolation is often used in 3-D medical image to compensate for information insufficiency during image reconstruction by simulating additional images between two-dimensional images. Reversible data hiding has become significant branch in information hiding field. Reversibility allows the original media to be completely restored without any degradation after the embedded messages have been extracted. This study proposes a high-capacity image hiding scheme by exploiting an interpolating method called Interpolation by Neighboring Pixels (INP) on Maximum Difference Values to improve the performance of data hiding scheme proposed by Jung and Yoo. The proposed scheme offers the benefits of high embedding capacity with low computational complexity and good image quality. The experimental results showed that the proposed scheme has good performance for payload up to 2.28 bpp. Moreover, the INP yields higher PSNRs than other interpolating methods such as NMI, NNI and BI.

Server-less RFID authentication and searching protocol with enhanced security

This paper focuses on two interesting radio-frequency identification (RFID) cryptographic protocols: the server-less RFID authentication protocol that allows readers to authenticate tags without the help of any online backend servers, and the RFID searching protocol in which the verifier explicitly specifies the target tag to be searched and authenticated. These two kinds of RFID protocols play important roles in many RFID applications; however, the existing protocols either had security weaknesses or exhibited poor efficiency. This paper shows the weaknesses, and then proposes our server-less RFID authentication protocol and RFID searching protocol. The proposed protocols greatly enhance the security using one more hashing. Copyright

A Steganographic Method with High Embedding Capacity by Improving Exploiting Modification Direction

We propose an effective data hiding method based on the EMD embedding scheme proposed by Zhang et al. in order to enhance the embedding capacity. The main idea of our proposed scheme is to convert secret binary messages into a sequence of digits in an 8-ary notational system. Each secret digit is embedded into two cover pixels by modifying the least significant bits (LSBs). As the experimental results show, the embedding bit-rate of our scheme is 1.5 times better than the EMD embedding scheme. In a word, we propose a high-quality and high-capacity data hiding method that can ensure the stego-image quality and security.

A secure fragile watermarking scheme based on chaos-and-hamming code

In this work, a secure fragile watermarking scheme is proposed. Images are protected and any modification to an image is detected using a novel hybrid scheme combining a two-pass logistic map with Hamming code. For security purposes, the two-pass logistic map scheme contains a private key to resist the vector quantization (VQ) attacks even though the embedding scheme is block independent. To ensure image integrity, watermarks are embedded into the to-be-protected images which are generated using Hamming code technique. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme has satisfactory protection ability and can detect and locate various malicious tampering via image insertion, erasing, burring, sharpening, contrast modification, and even though burst bits. Additionally, experiments prove that the proposed scheme successfully resists VQ attacks.

Histogram-shifting-imitated reversible data hiding

Highlights? A novel data hiding scheme with reversibility. ? Simple pixel-shifting mapping to perform the embedding and extracting processes. ? An effective multiple-layer embedding without loss in image fidelity. This paper proposes a novel reversible data hiding scheme based on the histogram-shifting-imitated approach. Instead of utilizing the peak point of an image histogram, the proposed scheme manipulates the peak points of segments based on image intensity. The secret data can be embedded into the cover image by changing the peak point pixel value into other pixel value in the same segment. The proposed method uses a location map to guarantee the correct extraction of the secret data. Since the modification of the pixel value is limited within each segment, the quality of the stego image is only related to the size of the segmentation, which means after embedding data into the cover image, it can be reused to do the multi-layer data embedding while maintaining the high quality of the final stego image. The experimental results of comparison with other existing schemes demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme is superior to the others.

Reversible data hiding scheme based on dual stegano-images using orientation combinations

This work presents a novel reversible data hiding scheme based on combinations of pixel orientations located at two steganographic images to enhance embedding capacity and preserve good visual quality. Before secret data are embedded, the proposed scheme converts the data into a sequence of digits in a base-5 numeral system. The conversion then extends the abilitity to carry more secret data. When the secret data embedding procedure is performed, the original cover pixel value can only be modified by at most plus or minus one, thus ensuring that the stegano-image also has excellent visual quality. Moreover, image recovery does not require overhead information. Experimental results demonstrate that the embedding capacity is around 1.07 bpp and PSNR reaches 49.6 dB. The experimental comparison also reveals that the proposed scheme outperforms other related schemes in terms of embedding rate and retains a high visual effect of stegano-image.

Adjustable prediction-based reversible data hiding

Reversible data hiding has received considerable interest recently in the field of information hiding. However, most of difference expansion (DE-based) schemes suffer from the problem that image cannot be restored into its original one free from location map. Reversible data hiding scheme with location map cannot effectively raise hiding capacity; in addition, it also incurs the computational cost during embedding and extracting. This study presents a reversible data hiding scheme that is free of location map and thus the computational cost, associated with embedding and extracting, is lower than that of most DE-based schemes. Furthermore, our scheme solves the problem of the low embedding rate of Tseng and Hsieh@?s scheme because our scheme takes advantage of the bulk of relatively high small prediction-errors to raise embedding capacity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves the larger payload and the better image quality than some existing schemes by an adjustable control factor. The performance of the proposed scheme is more stable for the different images.

Anti-Forensics with Steganographic Data Embedding in Digital Images

E-forensics investigates and extracts confidential information from electronic products; in other words, the anti-forensics indicates that evidences in those products are imperceptible and undetected. This work presents an anti-forensic steganography method that can embed and extract messages from images. Highlight of exploiting modification direction (HoEMD) and adaptive EMD (AdEMD) methods use the module operation and take into account of the sensitive nature of a human visual system. The HoEMD approach exploits the pixel directions. A pixel with a larger change implies more pixel directions and, ultimately, a larger embedding capacity. The pixel differencing in the proposed AdEMD method is used to evaluate whether the pixel located in the edge area can tolerate a larger change than that of the pixel location in a smooth area. To successfully extract a message, the differencing value is maintained on the same level before and after data is concealed; a delicate adjusting phase is used as well. In contrast with the PVD and LSB replacement method of Wu et al., LSB substitution method, and Lee and Chens data hiding scheme based on modulus function, the proposed steganography system has a larger embedding capacity and a higher image quality. Effectiveness of the proposed steganography schemes over that of a previous blind steganalyzer is demonstrated using the statistical attack of Chi-square analysis.