On the privacy-preserving outsourcing scheme of reversible data hiding over encrypted image data in cloud computing

Advanced cloud computing technology provides cost saving and flexibility of services for users. With the explosion of multimedia data, more and more data owners would outsource their personal multimedia data on the cloud. In the meantime, some computationally expensive tasks are also undertaken by cloud servers. However, the outsourced multimedia data and its applications may reveal the data owner's private information because the data owners lose the control of their data. Recently, this thought has aroused new research interest on privacy-preserving reversible data hiding over outsourced multimedia data. In this paper, two reversible data hiding schemes are proposed for encrypted image data in cloud computing: reversible data hiding by homomorphic encryption and reversible data hiding in encrypted domain. The former is that additional bits are extracted after decryption and the latter is that extracted before decryption. Meanwhile, a combined scheme is also designed. This paper proposes the privacy-preserving outsourcing scheme of reversible data hiding over encrypted image data in cloud computing, which not only ensures multimedia data security without relying on the trustworthiness of cloud servers, but also guarantees that reversible data hiding can be operated over encrypted images at the different stages. Theoretical analysis confirms the correctness of the proposed encryption model and justifies the security of the proposed scheme. The computation cost of the proposed scheme is acceptable and adjusts to different security levels.