Combating digital document forgery using new secure information hiding algorithm

Abstract

The recent digital revolution has facilitated communication, data portability and on-the-fly manipulation. Unfortunately, this has brought along some critical security vulnerabilities that put digital documents at risk. The problem is in the security mechanism adopted to secure these documents by means of encrypted passwords; however, this security shield does not actually protect the documents which are stored intact. We propose a solution to this real world problem through a 1D hash algorithm coupled with 2D irFFT (irreversible fast Fourier transform) to encrypt digital documents in the 2D spatial domain. This method is described elsewhere in [1]. Further by applying an imperceptible information hiding technique we can add another security layer which is resistant to noise and to a certain extent JPEG compression. We support this assertion by showing a practical example which is drawn from our set of experiments. Our proposal not only points out forgery but also lets a jury or a forensics expert have access to the original document despite being manipulated. This would undoubtedly be very useful in cases of disputes or claims.