The development of the web and the advances in computer technology have produced a proliferation of digital media content which can be efficiently copied, processed and distributed at negligible cost, both for licit and illicit use. Security issues are therefore very important features in many imaging applications targeted by JPEG 2000.

To address this issue, JPEG 2000 Secured (JPSEC) or Part 8 of the standard is standardising tools and solutions in terms of specifications in order to ensure the security of transaction, protection of contents (IPR), and protection of technologies (IP), and to allow applications to generate, consume, and exchange JPEG 2000 Secured bitstreams..

Applications addressed by JPSEC include the following examples, to mention a few:

· Encryption: JPSEC will provide a flexible mechanism to allow for encryption of image content and metadata. This includes partial encryption of the latter, or encryption with different strengths.

· Source authentication: JPSEC allow for verification of authenticity of the source.

· Data integrity: JPSEC will allow for data integrity verification. This includes semi-robust integrity verification, as well as mechanisms to optionally identify locations in the image content where the integrity is put into question.

· Conditional access: JPSEC will allow for conditional access to portions of an image or its associated metadata. For instance, a user could be allowed to view a low resolution (preview) of an image without being able to visualize a higher resolution.

· Ownership  protection:  JPSEC will allow for protection of the content owner rights (copyright). This includes ownership identification mechanisms robust to malicious attacks and non malicious processing of the JPEG 2000 bitstream and/or the image it represent.

The underlying techniques to protect the content include digital signatures, watermarking, encryption, scrambling, and key generation and management. These techniques will be enabled in JPSEC by means of a registration authority. More specifically, all techniques have to be previously registered in a central repository, the registration authority, which uniquely identify these techniques.

2KAN partners will design a security algorithm that will take advantage of the hierarchical nature of JPEG2000 and demonstrate it in the case of conditional access control. The approach will rely on well established security approaches, such as DES or AES. The software implementation will be demonstrated for further integration in the 2KAN system.

The aim of 2KAN is to give citizens, libraries, medical organizations, etc., a new perspective of secure implication with new working methods. Security and authentication are key features in the objective of the Consortium, where IPR and content protection are identified factors for the success of the technology. For instance, by providing strong encryption in the JPEG 2000 bitstream, photographic curators, museum directors, content providers, archivists, doctors, etc., will be able to fully use and take advantage of JPEG 2000 features without worrying any more about copyright, privacy and security.

With its close links to the Professional Imaging domains, such as press agencies and Cultural Heritage exploitation, 2KAN has the best set of tools, including legal status of one of the partners, to address the critical domain of anti-piracy protection. But it has also links to the medical domain where access control, authenticity and privacy require a lot of protection, including encryption for some of the image data or the metadata.