A Hybrid Cryptographic–Watermarking Framework for Secure Multimedia Transmission in Adversarial Environments
Keywords:
Adversarial environments, AES-256 encryption, Cryptographic watermarking, DWT-SVD, Multimedia security, Spread-spectrum watermarkingAbstract
The rapid proliferation of digital multimedia content across open networks has precipitated an unprecedented demand for robust mechanisms that simultaneously ensure confidentiality, authenticity, and integrity of transmitted data. This paper presents a novel hybrid cryptographic watermarking framework that synergistically integrates AES-256 symmetric encryption, RSA-2048 public-key infrastructure, and a robust spread-spectrum digital watermarking algorithm to provide multi-layered protection for multimedia content in adversarial environments. The proposed framework employs a dual-phase protection strategy: in the first phase, the host multimedia content is encrypted using AES-256 in Cypher Block Chaining (CBC) mode, ensuring that the raw content remains confidential against eavesdropping attacks. In the second phase, an imperceptible yet robust digital watermark carrying authentication metadata is embedded into the encrypted domain using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) techniques. The watermark signal is spread across multiple frequency sub-bands to enhance robustness against geometric, signal processing, and compression attacks. Experimental evaluations conducted on standard benchmark datasets, including USC-SIPI and BOWS-2, demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves a Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) exceeding 48 dB, a Normalised Correlation (NC) coefficient above 0.99, and a Bit Error Rate (BER) below 0.001 under various attack scenarios, including JPEG compression, Gaussian noise, rotation, and cropping. The framework also demonstrates resilience against known cryptographic attacks, including chosen-plaintext and known-plaintext attacks. The computational overhead remains within acceptable bounds for real-time multimedia streaming applications, making the proposed framework a viable solution for secure multimedia transmission in adversarial network environments.
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