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1. AUSOME: authenticating social media images using frequency analysis

   https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2663296  

   Poredi, Nihal; Nagothu, Deearj; Chen, Yu (June 2023, Proceedings Volume 12542, Disruptive Technologies in Information Sciences VII)

   Wysocki, Bryant T.; Holt, James; Blowers, Misty (Ed.)

   Ever since human society entered the age of social media, every user has had a considerable amount of visual content stored online and shared in variant virtual communities. As an efficient information circulation measure, disastrous consequences are possible if the contents of images are tampered with by malicious actors. Specifically, we are witnessing the rapid development of machine learning (ML) based tools like DeepFake apps. They are capable of exploiting images on social media platforms to mimic a potential victim without their knowledge or consent. These content manipulation attacks can lead to the rapid spread of misinformation that may not only mislead friends or family members but also has the potential to cause chaos in public domains. Therefore, robust image authentication is critical to detect and filter off manipulated images. In this paper, we introduce a system that accurately AUthenticates SOcial MEdia images (AUSOME) uploaded to online platforms leveraging spectral analysis and ML. Images from DALL-E 2 are compared with genuine images from the Stanford image dataset. Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) are used to perform a spectral comparison. Additionally, based on the differences in their frequency response, an ML model is proposed to classify social media images as genuine or AI-generated. Using real-world scenarios, the AUSOME system is evaluated on its detection accuracy. The experimental results are encouraging and they verified the potential of the AUSOME scheme in social media image authentications. 

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2. Understanding the Use of Fauxtography on Social Media

   Wang, Yuping; Tahmasbi, Fatemeh; Blackburn, Jeremy; Bradlyn, Barry; De Cristofaro, Emiliano; Magerman, David; Zannettou, Savvas; Stringhini, Gianluca (June 2021, Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media)

   Budak, Ceren; Cha, Meeyoung; Quercia, Daniele; Xie, Lexing (Ed.)

   Despite the influence that image-based communication has on online discourse, the role played by images in disinformation is still not well understood. In this paper, we present the first large-scale study of fauxtography, analyzing the use of manipulated or misleading images in news discussion on online communities. First, we develop a computational pipeline geared to detect fauxtography, and identify over 61k instances of fauxtography discussed on Twitter, 4chan, and Reddit. Then, we study how posting fauxtography affects engagement of posts on social media, finding that posts containing it receive more interactions in the form of re-shares, likes, and comments. Finally, we show that fauxtography images are often turned into memes by Web communities. Our findings show that effective mitigation against disinformation need to take images into account, and highlight a number of challenges in dealing with image-based disinformation. 

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3. E-Cap Net: an efficient-capsule network for shallow and deepfakes forgery detection

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-023-01092-z  

   Ilyas, Hafsa; Javed, Ali; Malik, Khalid Mahmood; Irtaza, Aun (April 2023, Multimedia Systems)

   Deepfakes represent the generation of synthetic/fake images or videos using deep neural networks. As the techniques used for the generation of deepfakes are improving, the threats including social media disinformation, defamation, impersonation, and fraud are becoming more prevalent. The existing deepfakes detection models, including those that use convolution neural networks, do not generalize well when subjected to multiple deepfakes generation techniques and cross-corpora setting. Therefore, there is a need for the development of effective and efficient deepfakes detection methods. To explicitly model part-whole hierarchical relationships by using groups of neurons to encode visual entities and learn the relationships between real and fake artifacts, we propose a novel deep learning model efficient-capsule network (E-Cap Net) for classifying the facial images generated through different deepfakes generative techniques. More specifically, we introduce a low-cost max-feature-map (MFM) activation function in each primary capsule of our proposed E-Cap Net. The use of MFM activation enables our E-Cap Net to become light and robust as it suppresses the low activation neurons in each primary capsule. Performance of our approach is evaluated on two standard, largescale and diverse datasets i.e., Diverse Fake Face Dataset (DFFD) and FaceForensics++ (FF++), and also on the World Leaders Dataset (WLRD). Moreover, we also performed a cross-corpora evaluation to show the generalizability of our method for reliable deepfakes detection. The AUC of 99.99% on DFFD, 99.52% on FF++, and 98.31% on WLRD datasets indicate the effectiveness of our method for detecting the manipulated facial images generated via different deepfakes techniques. 

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4. Securing Visually-Aware Recommender Systems: An Adversarial Image Reconstruction and Detection Framework

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3743681  

   Yin, Minglei; Liu, Bin; Gong, Neil Zhenqiang; Li, Xin (September 2025, ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems)

   With rich visual data, such as images, becoming readily associated with items, visually-aware recommendation systems (VARS) have been widely used in different applications. Recent studies have shown that VARS are vulnerable to item-image adversarial attacks, which add human-imperceptible perturbations to the clean images associated with those items. Attacks on VARS pose new security challenges to a wide range of applications, such as e-commerce and social media, where VARS are widely used. How to secure VARS from such adversarial attacks becomes a critical problem. Currently, there is still a lack of systematic studies on how to design defense strategies against visual attacks on VARS. In this article, we attempt to fill this gap by proposing anadversarial image denoising and detectionframework to secure VARS. Our proposed method can simultaneously (1) secure VARS from adversarial attacks characterized bylocalperturbations by image denoising based onglobalvision transformers; and (2) accurately detect adversarial examples using a novel contrastive learning approach. Meanwhile, our framework is designed to be used as both a filter and a detector so that they can bejointlytrained to improve the flexibility of our defense strategy to a variety of attacks and VARS models. Our approach is uniquely tailored for VARS, addressing the distinct challenges in scenarios where adversarial attacks can differ across industries, for instance, causing misclassification in e-commerce or misrepresentation in real estate. We have conducted extensive experimental studies with two popular attack methods (FGSM and PGD). Our experimental results on two real-world datasets show that our defense strategy against visual attacks is effective and outperforms existing methods on different attacks. Moreover, our method demonstrates high accuracy in detecting adversarial examples, complementing its robustness across various types of adversarial attacks. 

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5. Detecting Insider attacks in Blockchain Networks

   Ajayi, O.; Saadawi, T. (November 2021, IEEE 2021 International Symposium on Networks, Computers and Communications: Trust, Security, and Privacy (ISNCC- 2021 TSP)

   null (Ed.)

   Blockchain technology has recently gained high popularity in data security, primarily to mitigate against data breach and manipulation. Since its inception in 2008, it has been applied in different areas mainly to maintain data integrity and consistency. Blockchain has been tailored to secure data due to its data immutability and distributive technology. Despite the high success rate in data security, the inability to identify compromised insider nodes is one of the significant problems encountered in blockchain architectures. A Blockchain network is made up of nodes that initiate, verify and validate transactions. If compromised, these nodes can manipulate submitted transactions, inject fake transactions, or retrieve unauthorized information that might eventually compromise the stored data's integrity and consistency. This paper proposes a novel method of detecting these compromised blockchain nodes using a server-side authentication process and thwart their activities before getting updated in the blockchain ledger. In evaluating the proposed system, we perform four common insider attacks, which fall under the following three categories: (1)Those attacks targeting the Blockchain to bring it down. (2) the attacks that attempt to inject fake data into the database. (3) The attacks that attempt to hijack or retrieve unauthorized data. We described how we implement the attacks and how our architecture detects them before they impact the network. Finally, we displayed the attack detection time for each attack and compared our approach with other existing methods. 

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