Unequal authenticity protection (UAP) for rate-distortion-optimized secure streaming of multimedia over wireless networks

This paper presents a new notion of authenticating degraded multimedia content streamed over wireless networks - unequal authenticity protection (UAP). Multimedia content differs from other data in that the importance of different bits within a bitstream often varies. Therefore, given limited resources, a natural solution is to apply better authenticity protection to more important bits, and vice versa. In this paper, a quantitative relationship between the optimal authentication probability and the given resource budget is firstly derived, followed by a proposed authentication graph which realizes the idea of UAP. Simulation results further confirm the validity of the proposal.