ProtAIN: Protecting the Authenticity and Integrity Properties of NFT Images

Abstract

Non-Fungible Tokens (or, for short, NFT) establish the ownership and the authenticity of digital assets. Regardless the high security levels provided by blockchain, are not excluded the cases where the ownership of a digital object may be claimed without proper rights. Fraud and copyright infringement should be prevented through the insurance of the authenticity and the integrity of a digital object associated with an NFT. In this work we consider the case of NFT images under the aspect of being susceptible to duplication, theft, tampering, fraud, or in general any potential threat against their authenticity and integrity properties. To deal with such cases we propose an integrated system that provides an a priori embedding of authenticity and integrity related information by deploying robust authenticity information hiding in the frequency domain alongside fragile integrity information hiding in the spatial domain before the image is being publicly available as NFT. Moreover, an automated secure procedure for the development of smart contracts alongside the development of an NFT dual that serves as backup and is not publicly available through the marketplace is proposed in order to retain the initial digital image. We design a modular architecture that incorporates all the components proposed in this work and discuss its potentials on its deployment over different digital objects that can be considered as NFTs.