LSMM: A Life-cycle Security Management Mechanism for Secure Image Sharing

During the storing, transferring, processing, and exchanging phases of the full life-cycle of secure image sharing, there may exist security issues such as information leakage, infringement and abuse. To address those problems, a life-cycle security management mechanism is proposed. By utilizing the Commutative Encryption and Watermarking (CEW), the mechanism ensures that the ownership and confidentiality of one image can hardly be tampered with and compromised. Besides, with the help of the blockchain, the mechanism is enabled to record any changes during the whole process of the image sharing, which makes copyright traceability possible and thus reduces the occurrence of infringement and abuse. The experiment result shows that, in our mechanism, the quality of plaintext image with watermark obtained by decryption is high, and the invisibility of watermark is preserved. Also, the efficient analysis and experimenting of the mechanism exhibits that it is feasible in practice.