Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Smart Systems and Inventive Technology (ICSSIT 2020)

IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP20P17-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-5821-1

A Unique Approach towards Image Publication and

Provenance using Blockchain

Rohit Sharma Siddhesh Pawar Siddhita Gurav

Department of Information Technology Department of Information Technology Department of Information Technology
Sardar Patel Institute of Technology Sardar Patel Institute of Technology Sardar Patel Institute of Technology
Mumbai, India Mumbai, India Mumbai, India
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

Prasenjit Bhavathankar
Department of Information Technology
Sardar Patel Institute of Technology
Mumbai, India
p [email protected]
Abstract—The recent spurt of incidents related to copyrights the publishing cost, providing more accessibility to users for
and security breaches has led to the monetary loss of several browsing content without incurring any extra cost.
digital content creators and publishers. These incidents conclude The proposed system is suitable for Interaction Network and
that the existing system lacks the ability to uphold the integrity of
their published content. Moreover, some of the digital content Content Crowd-sourcing Internet Platform. Each user identity
owners rely on third parties, results in lack of ability to provide is the fundamental characteristics of these platforms. All these
provenance of digital media. The question that needs to be users interact with each other on the platform through their
addressed today is whether modern technologies can be specified accounts. Since users will have more freedom to
leveraged to suppress such incidents and regain the confidence of browse diversified content and its owners, it will attract more
creators and the audience. Fortunately, this paper presents a
unique framework that empowers digital content creators to have users to create and publish their content and leverage the
complete control over the place of its origin, accessibility and concept of networking. The key aspect of our proposed system
impose restrictions on unauthorized alteration of their content. is based on collecting content from different users and
This framework harnesses the power of the Ethereum platform, a providing a platform for other users to view these contents.
part of Blockchain technology, and uses S mart Contracts as a key This will eventually help them for their future creations by
component empowering the creators with enhanced control of
their content and the corresponding audience. leveraging the concept of networking and communication.
Index Terms—Blockchain, S mart Contracts, Ethereum, prove-
II. RELAT ED W ORK
nance, digital content
Some of the existing IoT enabled devices such as
smartwatches, contact lenses, fitness bands have a huge impact
I. INT RODUCT ION
on our lives as they are capable to store the data collected by
Digital content published by the legitimate artists can be in sensors and provide service to their users [1]. Moreover, if an
real danger these days due to an increase in security breaches. original artist has published any work then they have to trust
Also, the original artist does not have full control over their third parties for monitoring and security purpose of their
published digital content. Therefore, there is a need for some digital content. Due to advancement in the existing technology,
effective solution which will help original artists to have fake digital content can also be created known as Deepfakes
complete authority over their published work. Since [2]. These deepfakes can raise many questions to someone’s
Blockchain technology provides a decentralized approach, also credibility. Deepfakes can be detected using RNN, by
the data in Blockchain cannot be corrupted easily and it adds exploiting visual artifacts, detecting eye blinking. In case of
an extra layer of security it can be a perfect match for these Eye Blinking, the proposed solution uses the method of
kinds of problems. Any changes to the original content will detecting the eye- blinking of the person in the video which is
result in the creation of a new block in the ethereum network, generally not present in synthesized fake videos made by
which will have its unique hash-code value. Moreover, it using DNN- based software called as DeepFake. [3]. Also,
includes Smart Contracts which will help original artists to DeepFakes and Face2Face can be effectively exposed by
overcome the existing problems. The proposed system relatively simple visual artifacts. [4]. Blockchain technology
provides these functionalities with minimal expense by along with smart contracts will erase the existence of third
significantly reducing parties. [5]. Also, Bitcoin has proved itself in the financial
domain. It has also proved that trusted and auditable
computing is possible.

978-1-7281-5821-1/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE 311

Authorized licensed use limited to: Middlesex University. Downloaded on November 26,2023 at 21:30:20 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Smart Systems and Inventive Technology (ICSSIT 2020)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP20P17-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-5821-1

[6]. Blockchain technology improves the efficiency of content

distribution network. Also, Blockchain along with iterative
self- organizing data analysis techniques algorithm which can
be abbreviated as ISODATA which can be considered as the
upgraded version of the k-means clustering method uses GNP
services to estimate the distance between the publishers and
helpers. [7]
III. M E T HODOL OGY
The proposed system helps the original artist to have
complete authority over their published work by uploading it
to the IPFS. Since the IPFS is a blockchain-based distributed
file storage, one cannot create multiple copies of the same
published digital content. This also guarantees the integrity of
the published digital content, thereby regaining the confidence
of creators and the audience. The entities involved in the
proposed system are original artists, IPFS system, secondary
artist. The role of the components which are depicted in Figure
1have been elaborated further.
• User Interface: - The proposed system takes media files
as an input such as png, jpeg, mp4, mkv, etc. The Fig. 1. Architecture Diagram of proposed work
uploaded file is sent to the InterPlanetary File System
through web3.js library. Web3,js assembles the libraries
which provide interaction between nodes using HTTP or a smart-contract which gets created while
Interprocess communication. It creates requests to the publishing also has a unique address. Only one
node using RPC (Remote Procedure Call) to read or write smart contract can be associated with one media file
data. The IPFS returns a hashcode and the contract published. The unique hash value that was
address to the frontend. To ensure the integrity of digital generated after successful storing and publishing
content, the returned hashcode can be used to view the can now be used to access and retrieve that media.
availability of published digital content. The User • InterPlanetary File System: It is an open-source, peer-
Interface of the proposed system is built using React to-peer distributed protocol file system for all computing
library as it helps to create a single web page application, devices. It stores the media files, smart contract, etc. in a
resulting in low latency. The user interface also displays decentralized manner. It uniquely identifies the media
all the published media in the system and this digital through the hash code value, which is immutable.
media can be viewed easily using scrolling options for
better serviceability. RESULT S
• Smart Contract: - The artist needs to login to the system A. Uploading Digital Image
with their metamask account before publishing any The image provided as an input to the system gets
content and thus enters the network. When the user successfully published in the IPFS system. An IPFS hash and
uploads the content on a network through the user a Smart Contract address associated with the published Image
interface, a smart contract gets created consisting of all is generated. If the provided input does not match the
the attributes which include the name of the original requirements such as the provided input is text files or any
artist, the ipfs hash value of the digital content. compressed files then it will generate an error such that only
1) Contract Registration: Allows the original and Smart Contract. This IPFS is a unique hash value generated
secondary artist to register the contract to publish for every input file provided by the user. This hash can be used
the content to retrieve and view the published image.
2) Attestation of Contract: After creating a child
contract, original artist attested the child contract by B. Accessing / Distributing the Digital Content
mentioning the parent contract address and other After the digital image or multimedia is published, it can be
related information, for provenance tracking and viewed or retrieved using the Unique hash generated during
then it is linked with t h e parent contract. the publication. This image is no-tampered and the sole rights
3) Trace Source: It checks the traceability of content of this image/ multimedia are owned by the publisher. It can
for authenticity and credibility by using the parent be viewed or accessed by the other artist in the network
and child contract linkages. through Smart Contracts. To access it by another artist, a
4) Publish Content: After verifying the traceability, request is generated which is sent to the original artist. He then
the artist can publish the content on t h e platform. views the request and decides whether to accept or deny the
The request. If

978-1-7281-5821-1/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE 312

Authorized licensed use limited to: Middlesex University. Downloaded on November 26,2023 at 21:30:20 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Smart Systems and Inventive Technology (ICSSIT 2020)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP20P17-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-5821-1

C. Displaying all the Published Images.

The published images can be viewed by all the artists in the
network. This helps the artists who have published something
make a name for themselves and they get recognition and
credits for their work which encourages them to publish more
contents. These images are shown in a single page and artists
can scroll the pages to view all the diversified and breathtaking
content of different publishers.

I V. CONCL USI ON
Fig. 2. Uploading Digital Media Thus, the system presented in this paper uses blockchain
architecture along with smart contracts to provide a unique
way of publishing a digital image online without relying on
the request is accepted, then the artist can view the content but any centralized system. This system uses IPFS storage for
needs to be careful about further distribution as any tampering publishing and storing images which leads to the
can lead to severe action against him. decentralization of power among all artist. The most important
aspect of this system which can be considered as a crucial part
of the system is the smart contracts associated with any
published image as it helps in tracking the metadata of the
image and artists which are directly or indirectly linked to it.
These smart contracts deployed can handle multiple requests
making the system more robust and secure from any
overloading.

V . LIMIT AT IONS AND FUT URE W ORK

Incidentally as all systems have some limitations, the system
proposed in this paper also have some of the limitations which
are mentioned below:
1) The system only shows the published image and their
Fig. 3. Published Digital content
metadata there may be cases when the image cannot be
published since the system needs ethers for computation
which are costly so there should be sufficient amount of
ethers before publishing any content
2) The system mainly focuses on distributed IPFS storage
so every artist needs to join the network and verify their
credentials through consensus before using the system
3) This system does not collaborate with other websites and
so the scope of this project is limited to the community
of artists who have joined our network rather than all
amateur users who have not joined our network and
wants to praise the art.
The system at present is limited to artist community but can be
opened to all users who want to appreciate the artist’s work.
The gas cost for the computation of the system can be further
optimized that reduces the overall development cost and this ,in
turn, increases the number of artists joining the network. This
system can be expanded to publish the digital contents which
are currently excluded in the publication and more diversifies
artist can publish their contents which will not only be limited
to multimedia and images but also news, articles, journals, etc.
This system can be optimized further to be able to prevent any
tampering or illegal distribution of any of the contents of the
Fig. 4. MetaMask publications which in turn curbs the spread of any fake or
dangerous contents that include multimedia, images, news,
articles, etc.

978-1-7281-5821-1/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE 313

Authorized licensed use limited to: Middlesex University. Downloaded on November 26,2023 at 21:30:20 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Smart Systems and Inventive Technology (ICSSIT 2020)
IEEE Xplore Part Number: CFP20P17-ART; ISBN: 978-1-7281-5821-1

REFERENCES
[1] I. T orre, F. Koceva, O. R. Sanchez and G. Adorni, ”A framework for
personal data protection in the IoT,” 2016 11th International Conference
for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions (ICITST),Barcelona,
2016, pp. 384-391.
[2] D. Güera and E. J. Delp, ”Deepfake Video Detection Using Recurrent
Neural Networks,” 15th IEEE International Conference on Advanced
Video and Signal Based Surveillance , New Zealand, 2018, pp. 1-6.
[3] Y. Li, M. Chang and S. Lyu, ”In Ictu Oculi: Exposing AI Created Fake
Videos by Detecting Eye Blinking,” 2018 IEEE International Workshop
on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS), Hong Kong, Hong Kong,
2018, pp. 1-7.
[4] F. Matern, C. Riess and M. Stamminger, ”Exploiting Visual Artifacts
to Expose Deepfakes and Face Manipulations,” 2019 IEEE Winter Ap-
plications of Computer Vision Workshops (WACVW), Waikoloa Village,
HI, USA, 2019, pp. 83-92.
[5] A. Kosba, A. Miller, E. Shi, Z. Wen and C. Papamanthou, ”Hawk:
T he Blockchain Model of Cryptography and Privacy-Preserving Smart
Contracts,” 2016 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP),San
Jose, CA, 2016, pp. 839-858.
[6] G. Zyskind, O. Nathan and A. ’. Pentland, ”Decentralizing Privacy:
Using Blockchain to Protect Personal Data 2015 IEEE Security and
Privacy Workshops, San Jose,CA, 2015, pp. 180-184.
[7] Y. Wu, P. Zheng, J. Guo, W. Zhang and J. Huang, ”A Controllable
Efficient Content Distribution Framework Based on Blockchain and
ISODATA,” 2018 17th IEEE International Conference On Trust, Se-
curity And Privacy In Computing And Communications/ 12th IEEE
International Conference On Big Data Science And Engineering (Trust-
Com/BigDataSE),New York, NY, 2018, pp. 1698-1701.
[8] A. Vishwa and F. K. Hussain, ”A Blockchain based approach for
multimedia privacy protection and provenance,” 2018 IEEE Symposium
Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI), Bangalore, India, 2018,
pp. 1941-1945.
[9] A. Nayak and K. Dutta, ”Blockchain: The perfect data protection tool,”
2017 International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Control
(I2C2), Coimbatore, 2017, pp. 1-3.
[10 ] D. Bhowmik and T . Feng, ”The multimedia blockchain: A distributed
and tamper-proof media transaction framework,” 2017 22nd Interna-
tional Conference on Digital Signal Processing (DSP),London, 2017,
pp. 1-5.

978-1-7281-5821-1/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE 314

Authorized licensed use limited to: Middlesex University. Downloaded on November 26,2023 at 21:30:20 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.