Commutative fragile zero-watermarking and encryption for image integrity protection

With the increasing demands of privacy protection and integrity protection of digital images, attention has been drawn to the commutativity of watermarking and encryption. In some of the existing works, watermarking and image encryption are commutative, but watermark detection and image decryption are not commutative. Meanwhile, in some other schemes, watermark detection and image decryption are commutative, but the order of watermarking and image encryption is fixed. The existing schemes cannot meet the requirement of commutativity. Therefore, we propose a novel commutative zero-watermarking and encryption scheme, in which the commutativity is equipped in both the phases of watermarking and image encryption and the phases of watermark detection and image decryption. The proposed scheme is fragile, and the zero-watermarking will not cause any modification of the image. Experiments show that the proposed scheme is effective and feasible. The illegal tampered area of the zero-watermarked image can be accurately detected and located.