A novel selective encryption scheme for H.264/AVC video with improved visual security

Abstract As cloud storage becomes more popular, concerns about data leakage have been increasing. Encryption techniques can be used to protect privacy of videos stored in the cloud. However, the recently proposed sketch attack for encrypted H.264/AVC video, which is based on the macroblock bitstream size (MBS), can generate the outline images of both intra-frames and inter-frames from a video encrypted by most existing encryption schemes; thus, the protection of the original video may be considered a failure. In this paper, a novel selective encryption scheme for H.264/AVC video with improved visual security is presented. Two different scrambling strategies that do not destroy the format compatibility are proposed to change the relative positions between macroblocks in intra-frames and inter-frames respectively, which in turn substantially distort the sketched outline images so that they do not disclose meaningful information. Moreover, the sign bits of non-zero DCT coefficients are encrypted to contribute to the visual security of our scheme, and an adaptive encryption key related to the intra prediction mode and the DCT coefficient distribution of each frame is employed to provide further security. The experimental results show that our encryption scheme can achieve a better visual scrambling effect with a small adverse impact on the video file size. Furthermore, the security analysis demonstrates that our scheme can successfully resist the MBS sketch attack compared with other related schemes. The proposed method is also proven secure against some other known attacks.