DCT-based cyber defense techniques

With the increasing popularity of video streaming services and multimedia sharing via social networks, there is a need to protect the multimedia from malicious use. An attacker may use steganography and watermarking techniques to embed malicious content, in order to attack the end user. Most of the attack algorithms are robust to basic image processing techniques such as filtering, compression, noise addition, etc. Hence, in this article two novel, real-time, defense techniques are proposed: Smart threshold and anomaly correction. Both techniques operate at the DCT domain, and are applicable for JPEG images and H.264 I-Frames. The defense performance was evaluated against a highly robust attack, and the perceptual quality degradation was measured by the well-known PSNR and SSIM quality assessment metrics. A set of defense techniques is suggested for improving the defense efficiency. For the most aggressive attack configuration, the combination of all the defense techniques results in 80% protection against cyber-attacks with PSNR of 25.74 db.