A stress test for robustness of photo response nonuniformity (camera sensor fingerprint) identification on smartphones
DATE:
2023-03-25
UNIVERSAL IDENTIFIER: http://hdl.handle.net/11093/4671
UNESCO SUBJECT: 3311.12 Equipo de Fotografía y Cinematografía ; 2209.16 Instrumentos Fotográficos ; 3307.13 Dispositivos de Grabación
DOCUMENT TYPE: article
ABSTRACT
In the field of forensic imaging, it is important to be able to extract a camera fingerprint
from one or a small set of images known to have been taken by the same camera (or image sensor).
Note that we are using the word fingerprint because it is a piece of information extracted from images
that can be used to identify an individual source camera. This technique is very important for certain
security and digital forensic situations. Camera fingerprint is based on a certain kind of random
noise present in all image sensors that is due to manufacturing imperfections and is, thus, unique
and impossible to avoid. Photo response nonuniformity (PRNU) has become the most widely used
method for source camera identification (SCI). In this paper, a set of attacks is designed and applied
to a PRNU-based SCI system, and the success of each method is systematically assessed both in the
case of still images and in the case of video. An attack method is defined as any processing that
minimally alters image quality and is designed to fool PRNU detectors or, in general, any camera
fingerprint detector. The success of an attack is assessed as the increment in the error rate of the
SCI system. The PRNU-based SCI system was taken from an outstanding reference that is publicly
available. Among the results of this work, the following are remarkable: the use of a systematic and
extensive procedure to test SCI methods, very thorough testing of PRNU with more than 2000 test
images, and the finding of some very effective attacks on PRNU-based SCI