Multimedia selective encryption by means of randomized arithmetic coding

We propose a novel multimedia security framework based on a modification of the arithmetic coder, which is used by most international image and video coding standards as entropy coding stage. In particular, we introduce a randomized arithmetic coding paradigm, which achieves encryption by inserting some randomization in the arithmetic coding procedure; notably, and unlike previous works on encryption by arithmetic coding, this is done at no expense in terms of coding efficiency. The proposed technique can be applied to any multimedia coder employing arithmetic coding; in this paper we describe an implementation tailored to the JPEG 2000 standard. The proposed approach turns out to be robust towards attempts to estimating the image or discovering the key, and allows very flexible protection procedures at the code-block level, allowing to perform total and selective encryption, as well as conditional access.