Security protection between users and the mobile media cloud

Mobile devices such as smartphones are widely deployed in the world, and many people use them to download/upload media such as video and pictures to remote servers. On the other hand, a mobile device has limited resources, and some media processing tasks must be migrated to the media cloud for further processing. However, a significant question is, can mobile users trust the media services provided by the media cloud service providers? Many traditional security approaches are proposed to secure the data exchange between mobile users and the media cloud. However, first, because multimedia such as video is large-sized data, and mobile devices have limited capability to process media data, it is important to design a lightweight security method; second, uploading and downloading multi-resolution images/videos make it difficult for the traditional security methods to ensure security for users of the media cloud. Third, the error-prone wireless environment can cause failure of security protection such as authentication. To address the above challenges, in this article, we propose to use both secure sharing and watermarking schemes to protect user's data in the media cloud. The secure sharing scheme allows users to upload multiple data pieces to different clouds, making it impossible to derive the whole information from any one cloud. In addition, the proposed scalable watermarking algorithm can be used for authentications between personal mobile users and the media cloud. Furthermore, we introduce a new solution to resist multimedia transmission errors through a joint design of watermarking and Reed- Solomon codes. Our studies show that the proposed approach not only achieves good security performance, but also can enhance media quality and reduce transmission overhead.