Flexible access control to JPEG 2000 image code-streams

JPEG 2000 is an international standard for still image compression in the 21st century. Part 8 of the standard, named JPSEC, is concerned with all the security aspects, in particular to access control and authentication. This paper presents a novel access control scheme for JPEG 2000 image code-streams. The proposed scheme is secure against collusion attacks and highly efficient. The scheme is also very flexible, allowing access control to JPEG 2000 image code-streams according to any combination of resolution., quality layer and region of interest. The "encrypt once, decrypt many ways" property of our scheme is designed to work seamlessly with the "compress once, decompress many ways" feature of the JPEG 2000 image code-streams. Our prototype implementation shows that the scheme is practical and is completely compatible with the core part of the JPEG 2000 standard.