The development of the web and the advances in computer technology have produced a proliferation of digital media content which can be efficiently copied, processed and distributed at negligible cost, both for licit and illicit use.     Security issues are therefore very important features in many imaging applications targeted by JPEG 2000.

To address this issue, JPEG 2000 Secured (JPSEC) or Part 8 of the standard is standardising tools and solutions in terms of specifications in order to ensure the security of transaction, protection of contents (IPR), and protection of technologies (IP), and to allow applications to generate, consume, and exchange JPEG 2000 Secured bitstreams..

Applications addressed by JPSEC include the following examples, to mention a few:

• Encryption: JPSEC will provide a flexible mechanism to allow for encryption of image content and metadata. This includes partial encryption of the latter, or encryption with different strengths.
  
• Source authentication: JPSEC allow for verification of authenticity of the source.
  
• Data integrity: JPSEC will allow for data integrity verification. This includes semi-robust integrity verification, as well as mechanisms to optionally identify locations in the image content where the integrity is put into question.
  
• Conditional access: JPSEC will allow for conditional access to portions of an image or its associated metadata. For instance, a user could be allowed to view a low resolution (preview) of an image without being able to visualize a higher resolution.
  
• Ownership  protection:  JPSEC will allow for protection of the content owner rights (copyright). This includes ownership identification mechanisms robust to malicious attacks and non malicious processing of the JPEG 2000 bitstream and/or the image it represent.

The underlying techniques to protect the content include digital signatures, watermarking, encryption, scrambling, and key generation and management. These techniques will be enabled in JPSEC by means of a registration authority. More specifically, all techniques have to be previously registered in a central repository, the registration authority, which uniquely identify these techniques.

Part 8 became an International Standard (ISO/IEC 15444-8) in July 2006

It is currently available for download from ITU-T as their Recommendation T.807

For further information, please contact:

Vania Conan , THALES Communications, chair of JPSEC Ad hoc group.
or
Prof. Touradj Ebrahimi , EPFL, editor of JPSEC.