Image authentication is the technology of verifying image origin, integrity and authenticity. A rich stream of research on image authentication has shown various trade-off among four favorable features, namely robustness, security, versatility and efficiency. Image data authentication has the highest level of security but provides no robustness/versatility. Image content authentication from robust hashing keeps robust to limited types of operations, and as a result its versatility is not satisfactory. Existing designs of image content authentication from advanced cryptographic primitives achieve robustness, security and versatility, at the cost of low efficiency. In this paper, we present a new design of image authentication with an improved trade-off among the aforementioned features. Our versatile design is robust to a number of predefined image processing operations. Its security can be reduced to q-strong Diffie-Hellman (q-SDH), a complexity problem used by existing cryptographic algorithms. From the aspect of efficiency, the new design has a constant-size authentication overhead (⩽ 2 kB) and a constant verification time (around 0.05 s). While the time of generating authentication overhead increases linearly with the number of permissible editing operations, it only takes around 0.33 s for 1000 types of permissible operations. We believe the new design will facilitate image applications where trustworthy image editing is required.

图像认证是验证图像来源，完整性和真实性的技术。关于图像认证的大量研究表明，在四个有利特征之间的各种取舍，即鲁棒性，安全性，多功能性和效率。图像数据身份验证具有最高的安全级别，但不提供鲁棒性/多功能性。来自健壮散列的图像内容身份验证对有限类型的操作保持健壮，因此其多功能性不令人满意。现有的来自高级密码原语的图像内容认证设计以低效率为代价实现了鲁棒性，安全性和多功能性。在本文中，我们提出了一种图像认证的新设计，并在上述功能之间进行了折衷。我们的通用设计对许多预定义的图像处理操作具有鲁棒性。它的安全性可以降低到q -strong Diffie-Hellman（q -SDH ），现有密码算法使用的复杂性问题。从效率方面来看，新设计具有恒定大小的验证开销（⩽2 kB）和恒定的验证时间（大约0.05 s）。虽然生成身份验证开销的时间随着允许的编辑操作的数量线性增加，但对于1000种类型的允许操作仅花费0.33 s。我们相信，新设计将有助于需要可信赖的图像编辑的图像应用。