Study and validation of tools interoperability in JPSEC

Digital imagery is important in many applications today, and the security of digital imagery is important today and is likely to gain in importance in the near future. The emerging international standard ISO/IEC JPEG-2000 Security (JPSEC) is designed to provide security for digital imagery, and in particular digital imagery coded with the JPEG-2000 image coding standard. One of the primary goals of a standard is to ensure interoperability between creators and consumers produced by different manufacturers. The JPSEC standard, similar to the popular JPEG and MPEG family of standards, specifies only the bitstream syntax and the receiver's processing, and not how the bitstream is created or the details of how it is consumed. This paper examines the interoperability for the JPSEC standard, and presents an example JPSEC consumption process which can provide insights in the design of JPSEC consumers. Initial interoperability tests between different groups with independently created implementations of JPSEC creators and consumers have been successful in providing the JPSEC security services of confidentiality (via encryption) and authentication (via message authentication codes, or MACs). Further interoperability work is on-going.