Embedding an Identity-Based Short Signature as a Digital Watermark

Digital watermarking aims at protecting multimedia content by hiding into it some data that can be used for such purposes as, for example, intellectual property protection or integrity control. Sometimes, the owner of an image would prefer to not transmit, publish, or hand to a cloud service the original image, but rather an encrypted version of it. Encrypted images allow for less embedding room with respect to their unencrypted counterparts, as there is less spatial correlation to leverage upon. An architecture for embedding as payload the digital signature of an encrypted image, by means of a reversible watermarking technique, is presented in this work. A noteworthy point is the use of an identity-based cryptosystem to avoid certificate management and improve performance. In addition, the use of IBS-1, a recently proposed signature scheme, allows for a reduction in the size of the signature