Franco Frattolillo | Università degli Studi del Sannio (original) (raw)

Papers by Franco Frattolillo

Applied Sciences

Digital watermarking can be used to implement mechanisms aimed at protecting the copyright of dig... more Digital watermarking can be used to implement mechanisms aimed at protecting the copyright of digital content distributed on the Internet. Such mechanisms support copyright identification and content tracking by enabling content providers to embed perceptually invisible watermarks into the distributed copies of content. They are employed in conjunction with watermarking protocols, which define the schemes of the web transactions by which buyers can securely purchase protected digital content distributed by content providers. In this regard, the “buyer friendly” and “mediated” watermarking protocols can ensure both a correct content protection and an easy participation of buyers in the transactions by which to purchase the distributed content. They represent a valid alternative to the classic “buyer and seller” watermarking protocols documented in the literature. However, their protection schemes could be further improved and simplified. This paper presents a new watermarking protoco...

TELKOMNIKA (Telecommunication Computing Electronics and Control)

International Journal of Information Security

Proceedings of the 5th Wseas International Conference on Software Engineering Parallel and Distributed Systems, 2006

Proceedings of the 2012 4th International Conference on Computational Aspects of Social Networks, CASoN 2012, 2012

ABSTRACT The advances in multimedia and networking technologies enable copyright infringement of ... more ABSTRACT The advances in multimedia and networking technologies enable copyright infringement of digital content distributed on Internet. Such infringement, particularly promoted by peer-to-peer file-sharing, causes copyright holders lost sales every year. Consequently, methods to protect digital copyright protection are needed in a global Internet environment. Watermarking protocols are recognized as a promising technique developed to address the problem of asserting authorship and determining accountability when piracy occurs. In this paper, a simple watermarking protocol purposely designed to be easily implemented in the current model of content distribution on the Internet is proposed. The protocol is secure and able to protect the digital asset of the web-based distribution and associated rights.

Studies in Computational Intelligence, 2013

ABSTRACT Credit scoring is the assessment of the risk associated with lending to an organization ... more ABSTRACT Credit scoring is the assessment of the risk associated with lending to an organization or an individual. Genetic Programming is an evolutionary computational technique that enables computers to solve problems without being explicitly programmed. This paper proposes a genetic programming approach for risk assessment. In particular, the study is set in order to predict, on a collection of real loan data, whether a credit request has to be approved or rejected. The task is to use existing data to develop rules for placing new observations into one of a set of discrete groups. The automation of such decision-making processes can lead to savings in time and money by relieving the load of work on an “expert” who would otherwise consider each new case individually. The proposed model provides good performance in terms of accuracy and error rate.

This index covers all technical items — papers, correspondence, reviews, etc. — that appeared in ... more This index covers all technical items — papers, correspondence, reviews, etc. — that appeared in this periodical during 2007, and items from previous years that were commented upon or corrected in 2007. Departments and other items may also be covered if they have been judged to have archival value. The Author Index contains the primary entry for each item, listed under the first author's name. The primary entry includes the coauthors' names, the title of the paper or other item, and its location, specified by the publication abbreviation, year, month, and ...

Although digital watermarking can be considered one of the key technologies to implement the copy... more Although digital watermarking can be considered one of the key technologies to implement the copyright protection of digital contents distributed on the Internet, most of the content distribution models based on watermarking protocols proposed in literature have been purposely designed for fixed networks and cannot be easily adapted to mobile networks. On the contrary, the use of mobile devices currently enables new types of services and business models, and this makes the development of new content distribution models for mobile environments strategic in the current scenario of the Internet. This paper presents and discusses a distribution model of watermarked digital contents for such environments able to achieve a trade-off between the needs of efficiency and security.

The Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems aim at protecting and enforcing the legal rights asso... more The Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems aim at protecting and enforcing the legal rights associated with the use of digital content distributed on the Internet. Most of such systems use watermarking techniques to implement the content protection. Although the effectiveness of the implemented protection strictly depends on the adopted watermarking techniques, an important role is also played by watermarking protocols. They define the scheme of the interactions that have to take place among the entities involved in the processes of content protection and web-based distribution governed by the DRM systems. This paper presents a DRM system developed as a web software platform to implement the copyright protection of multimedia digital content distributed on the Internet. The DRM system is based on a watermarking protocol previously developed by the authors, and has been designed as a service oriented architecture composed of a federation of coordinated web entities that play distinct roles and interact within a trusted environment.

The advances in networking and multimedia technologies have created opportunities for producers o... more The advances in networking and multimedia technologies have created opportunities for producers of digital content. However, the ability for anyone to make perfect copies of digital content and the ease by which copies can be distributed facilitate misuse, illegal distribution, plagiarism, misappropriation. Moreover, popular peer-to-peer software are widely used by Internet "pirates" to illegally share digital copyrighted content, thus violating the legal rights of the copyright owners. Known solutions like Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems aim at protecting and enforcing the legal rights associated with the use of digital content distributed on the Internet, but they may also disturb the balance between the information creation and distribution, and give rise to problems concerning with privacy. In fact, "fair use" and privacy are often invoked by web users: the former in order to prevent copyright owners from having the exclusive control over their creations than the copyright law intends, and the latter in order to preserve the ownership and distribution of confidential data. This paper reports on the most important problems tied to the use of DRM systems and, in the light of the current forensic trends, provides a number of suggestions that can be helpful to meet the conflicting interests of web users and content providers.

Modern Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems are often developed as web software platforms desi... more Modern Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems are often developed as web software platforms designed as service oriented architectures composed of a federation of coordinated web entities that play distinct roles and dynamically interact within a trusted environment. Such a design approach requires that trustu relationships have to be dynamically established across multiple and heterogeneous organizational boundaries so as to facilitate an ``on-the-fly'' resource sharing. This introduces non-trivial security architectural requirements concerning with the mechanisms that allow different security realms of web entities to be federated. This paper presents a DRM system developed as a web software platform designed to give a specific support both to the interaction of the web entities involved in the platform and to the development of the trusted relationships among them, in a much more flexible way than before, dynamically and with minimal overheads and shared infrastructure.

While the advances in networking technologies actually enable mobility and ubiquity of access to ... more While the advances in networking technologies actually enable mobility and ubiquity of access to computing resources located at different administrative domains, the progress in multimedia technologies has created large amounts of digital content that can be purchased and distributed on the Internet. Within this setting, the problem of the copyright protection of digital content has become a well-known research topic. This paper presents the architecture of a web software platform able to implement the copyright protection of digital content based on digital watermarking technology. The platform is structured as a service-oriented architecture composed of a federation of coordinated web entities and service providers which play distinct roles and interact within a trusted environment. Furthermore, the proposed architecture enables service providers to use a specific middleware to exploit the computing resources they need to provide their protection services. In fact, the middleware can aggregate computing resources directly available on the Internet as well as those belonging to multidomain, non-routable networks, thus enabling service providers to build internal computing environments arranged as cluster grids.While the advances in networking technologies actually enable mobility and ubiquity of access to computing resources located at different administrative domains, the progress in multimedia technologies has created large amounts of digital content that can be purchased and distributed on the Internet. Within this setting, the problem of the copyright protection of digital content has become a well-known research topic. This paper presents the architecture of a web software platform able to implement the copyright protection of digital content based on digital watermarking technology. The platform is structured as a service-oriented architecture composed of a federation of coordinated web entities and service providers which play distinct roles and interact within a trusted environment. Furthermore, the proposed architecture enables service providers to use a specific middleware to exploit the computing resources they need to provide their protection services. In fact, the middleware can aggregate computing resources directly available on the Internet as well as those belonging to multidomain, non-routable networks, thus enabling service providers to build internal computing environments arranged as cluster grids.

Middlewares are software infrastructures used to cluster heterogeneous and geographically distrib... more Middlewares are software infrastructures used to cluster heterogeneous and geographically distributed computational resources so as to exploit them as computing systems able to run large-scale applications. Although their main aim is to transform the internet into a sort of computational grid to which everyone can connect in order to execute distributed applications, a number of problems have still to be solved in order to make middlewares actually effective in such a context. For instance, exploiting computational resources available within 'departmental' organisations can be still considered a difficult task, since such resources are usually represented by computing nodes which belong to non-routable, private networks and are connected to the internet through publicly addressable IP front-end nodes. This paper presents a Java middleware that can support the execution of large-scale applications over heterogeneous multidomain, non-routable networks. In fact, the middleware can be also exploited to relieve programmers of the classic burden tied to the deployment of PVM run-time libraries and program executables among computational resources belonging to distinct network administrative domains. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Frattolillo, F. and Landolfi, F. (2011) 'Parallel and distributed computing on multidomain non-routable networks', Int.

Digital watermarking is considered to be a main technology for the copyright protection of multim... more Digital watermarking is considered to be a main technology for the copyright protection of multimedia digital content distributed on the Internet. However, watermarking procedures can effectively support copyright protection processes only if they are applied by employing specific watermarking protocols, which define the scheme of the interactions that have to take place among the entities involved in the content protection and web-based distribution. To this end, a number of current watermarking protocols can attain important achievements, such as the correct authentica-tion of buyers without exposing their identities during web transactions and the capability of resorting to trusted watermark certification authorities to ensure a copyright protection process that is able to correctly take into account the rights of both buyers and sellers. However, these protocols are often not suitable for web context, where buyers are usually neither provided with digital certificates issued by trusted certification authorities nor able to autonomously perform complex security actions to purchase digital content distributed by web-based content providers. This paper presents an improved version of a web-oriented and interactive anonymous buyer–seller watermarking protocol previously presented by the author. The protocol overcomes the drawbacks affecting relevant protocols existing in literature, and is based on a design approach that makes it suitable for web contexts.

Watermarking protocols are used in conjunction with digital watermarking techniques to protect di... more Watermarking protocols are used in conjunction with digital watermarking techniques to protect digital copyright on the Internet. They define the schemes of the web transactions by which buyers can purchase protected digital content distributed by content providers in a secure manner. Over the last few years, significant examples of watermarking protocols have been proposed in literature. However, a detailed examination of such protocols has revealed a number of problems that have to be addressed in order to make them suited for current web context. Therefore, based on the most relevant problems derived from literature, this article identifies the main challenges posed by the development of watermarking protocols for web context and presents a watermarking protocol that follows a new secure, buyer-centric and mediated design approach able to meet such challenges. ACM Reference Format: Franco Frattolillo. 2016. A buyer-friendly and mediated watermarking protocol for web context.

Workstations belonging to networked clusters cannot often be exploited since they are not provide... more Workstations belonging to networked clusters cannot often be exploited since they are not provided with valid IP addresses and are hidden from the Internet by IP addressable front-end machines. The paper presents a PVM extension that enables such clustered machines hidden from the Internet to take part in a PVM computation as hosts. This way, programmers can exploit low-cost, networked computing resources widely available within departmental organizations in a well-known programming environment, such as PVM, without having to adapt their large-scale applications to new grid programming environments.

Applied Sciences

Digital watermarking can be used to implement mechanisms aimed at protecting the copyright of dig... more Digital watermarking can be used to implement mechanisms aimed at protecting the copyright of digital content distributed on the Internet. Such mechanisms support copyright identification and content tracking by enabling content providers to embed perceptually invisible watermarks into the distributed copies of content. They are employed in conjunction with watermarking protocols, which define the schemes of the web transactions by which buyers can securely purchase protected digital content distributed by content providers. In this regard, the “buyer friendly” and “mediated” watermarking protocols can ensure both a correct content protection and an easy participation of buyers in the transactions by which to purchase the distributed content. They represent a valid alternative to the classic “buyer and seller” watermarking protocols documented in the literature. However, their protection schemes could be further improved and simplified. This paper presents a new watermarking protoco...

TELKOMNIKA (Telecommunication Computing Electronics and Control)

International Journal of Information Security

Proceedings of the 5th Wseas International Conference on Software Engineering Parallel and Distributed Systems, 2006

Proceedings of the 2012 4th International Conference on Computational Aspects of Social Networks, CASoN 2012, 2012

ABSTRACT The advances in multimedia and networking technologies enable copyright infringement of ... more ABSTRACT The advances in multimedia and networking technologies enable copyright infringement of digital content distributed on Internet. Such infringement, particularly promoted by peer-to-peer file-sharing, causes copyright holders lost sales every year. Consequently, methods to protect digital copyright protection are needed in a global Internet environment. Watermarking protocols are recognized as a promising technique developed to address the problem of asserting authorship and determining accountability when piracy occurs. In this paper, a simple watermarking protocol purposely designed to be easily implemented in the current model of content distribution on the Internet is proposed. The protocol is secure and able to protect the digital asset of the web-based distribution and associated rights.

Studies in Computational Intelligence, 2013

ABSTRACT Credit scoring is the assessment of the risk associated with lending to an organization ... more ABSTRACT Credit scoring is the assessment of the risk associated with lending to an organization or an individual. Genetic Programming is an evolutionary computational technique that enables computers to solve problems without being explicitly programmed. This paper proposes a genetic programming approach for risk assessment. In particular, the study is set in order to predict, on a collection of real loan data, whether a credit request has to be approved or rejected. The task is to use existing data to develop rules for placing new observations into one of a set of discrete groups. The automation of such decision-making processes can lead to savings in time and money by relieving the load of work on an “expert” who would otherwise consider each new case individually. The proposed model provides good performance in terms of accuracy and error rate.

This index covers all technical items — papers, correspondence, reviews, etc. — that appeared in ... more This index covers all technical items — papers, correspondence, reviews, etc. — that appeared in this periodical during 2007, and items from previous years that were commented upon or corrected in 2007. Departments and other items may also be covered if they have been judged to have archival value. The Author Index contains the primary entry for each item, listed under the first author's name. The primary entry includes the coauthors' names, the title of the paper or other item, and its location, specified by the publication abbreviation, year, month, and ...

Although digital watermarking can be considered one of the key technologies to implement the copy... more Although digital watermarking can be considered one of the key technologies to implement the copyright protection of digital contents distributed on the Internet, most of the content distribution models based on watermarking protocols proposed in literature have been purposely designed for fixed networks and cannot be easily adapted to mobile networks. On the contrary, the use of mobile devices currently enables new types of services and business models, and this makes the development of new content distribution models for mobile environments strategic in the current scenario of the Internet. This paper presents and discusses a distribution model of watermarked digital contents for such environments able to achieve a trade-off between the needs of efficiency and security.

The Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems aim at protecting and enforcing the legal rights asso... more The Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems aim at protecting and enforcing the legal rights associated with the use of digital content distributed on the Internet. Most of such systems use watermarking techniques to implement the content protection. Although the effectiveness of the implemented protection strictly depends on the adopted watermarking techniques, an important role is also played by watermarking protocols. They define the scheme of the interactions that have to take place among the entities involved in the processes of content protection and web-based distribution governed by the DRM systems. This paper presents a DRM system developed as a web software platform to implement the copyright protection of multimedia digital content distributed on the Internet. The DRM system is based on a watermarking protocol previously developed by the authors, and has been designed as a service oriented architecture composed of a federation of coordinated web entities that play distinct roles and interact within a trusted environment.

The advances in networking and multimedia technologies have created opportunities for producers o... more The advances in networking and multimedia technologies have created opportunities for producers of digital content. However, the ability for anyone to make perfect copies of digital content and the ease by which copies can be distributed facilitate misuse, illegal distribution, plagiarism, misappropriation. Moreover, popular peer-to-peer software are widely used by Internet "pirates" to illegally share digital copyrighted content, thus violating the legal rights of the copyright owners. Known solutions like Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems aim at protecting and enforcing the legal rights associated with the use of digital content distributed on the Internet, but they may also disturb the balance between the information creation and distribution, and give rise to problems concerning with privacy. In fact, "fair use" and privacy are often invoked by web users: the former in order to prevent copyright owners from having the exclusive control over their creations than the copyright law intends, and the latter in order to preserve the ownership and distribution of confidential data. This paper reports on the most important problems tied to the use of DRM systems and, in the light of the current forensic trends, provides a number of suggestions that can be helpful to meet the conflicting interests of web users and content providers.

Modern Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems are often developed as web software platforms desi... more Modern Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems are often developed as web software platforms designed as service oriented architectures composed of a federation of coordinated web entities that play distinct roles and dynamically interact within a trusted environment. Such a design approach requires that trustu relationships have to be dynamically established across multiple and heterogeneous organizational boundaries so as to facilitate an ``on-the-fly'' resource sharing. This introduces non-trivial security architectural requirements concerning with the mechanisms that allow different security realms of web entities to be federated. This paper presents a DRM system developed as a web software platform designed to give a specific support both to the interaction of the web entities involved in the platform and to the development of the trusted relationships among them, in a much more flexible way than before, dynamically and with minimal overheads and shared infrastructure.

While the advances in networking technologies actually enable mobility and ubiquity of access to ... more While the advances in networking technologies actually enable mobility and ubiquity of access to computing resources located at different administrative domains, the progress in multimedia technologies has created large amounts of digital content that can be purchased and distributed on the Internet. Within this setting, the problem of the copyright protection of digital content has become a well-known research topic. This paper presents the architecture of a web software platform able to implement the copyright protection of digital content based on digital watermarking technology. The platform is structured as a service-oriented architecture composed of a federation of coordinated web entities and service providers which play distinct roles and interact within a trusted environment. Furthermore, the proposed architecture enables service providers to use a specific middleware to exploit the computing resources they need to provide their protection services. In fact, the middleware can aggregate computing resources directly available on the Internet as well as those belonging to multidomain, non-routable networks, thus enabling service providers to build internal computing environments arranged as cluster grids.While the advances in networking technologies actually enable mobility and ubiquity of access to computing resources located at different administrative domains, the progress in multimedia technologies has created large amounts of digital content that can be purchased and distributed on the Internet. Within this setting, the problem of the copyright protection of digital content has become a well-known research topic. This paper presents the architecture of a web software platform able to implement the copyright protection of digital content based on digital watermarking technology. The platform is structured as a service-oriented architecture composed of a federation of coordinated web entities and service providers which play distinct roles and interact within a trusted environment. Furthermore, the proposed architecture enables service providers to use a specific middleware to exploit the computing resources they need to provide their protection services. In fact, the middleware can aggregate computing resources directly available on the Internet as well as those belonging to multidomain, non-routable networks, thus enabling service providers to build internal computing environments arranged as cluster grids.

Middlewares are software infrastructures used to cluster heterogeneous and geographically distrib... more Middlewares are software infrastructures used to cluster heterogeneous and geographically distributed computational resources so as to exploit them as computing systems able to run large-scale applications. Although their main aim is to transform the internet into a sort of computational grid to which everyone can connect in order to execute distributed applications, a number of problems have still to be solved in order to make middlewares actually effective in such a context. For instance, exploiting computational resources available within 'departmental' organisations can be still considered a difficult task, since such resources are usually represented by computing nodes which belong to non-routable, private networks and are connected to the internet through publicly addressable IP front-end nodes. This paper presents a Java middleware that can support the execution of large-scale applications over heterogeneous multidomain, non-routable networks. In fact, the middleware can be also exploited to relieve programmers of the classic burden tied to the deployment of PVM run-time libraries and program executables among computational resources belonging to distinct network administrative domains. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Frattolillo, F. and Landolfi, F. (2011) 'Parallel and distributed computing on multidomain non-routable networks', Int.

Digital watermarking is considered to be a main technology for the copyright protection of multim... more Digital watermarking is considered to be a main technology for the copyright protection of multimedia digital content distributed on the Internet. However, watermarking procedures can effectively support copyright protection processes only if they are applied by employing specific watermarking protocols, which define the scheme of the interactions that have to take place among the entities involved in the content protection and web-based distribution. To this end, a number of current watermarking protocols can attain important achievements, such as the correct authentica-tion of buyers without exposing their identities during web transactions and the capability of resorting to trusted watermark certification authorities to ensure a copyright protection process that is able to correctly take into account the rights of both buyers and sellers. However, these protocols are often not suitable for web context, where buyers are usually neither provided with digital certificates issued by trusted certification authorities nor able to autonomously perform complex security actions to purchase digital content distributed by web-based content providers. This paper presents an improved version of a web-oriented and interactive anonymous buyer–seller watermarking protocol previously presented by the author. The protocol overcomes the drawbacks affecting relevant protocols existing in literature, and is based on a design approach that makes it suitable for web contexts.

Watermarking protocols are used in conjunction with digital watermarking techniques to protect di... more Watermarking protocols are used in conjunction with digital watermarking techniques to protect digital copyright on the Internet. They define the schemes of the web transactions by which buyers can purchase protected digital content distributed by content providers in a secure manner. Over the last few years, significant examples of watermarking protocols have been proposed in literature. However, a detailed examination of such protocols has revealed a number of problems that have to be addressed in order to make them suited for current web context. Therefore, based on the most relevant problems derived from literature, this article identifies the main challenges posed by the development of watermarking protocols for web context and presents a watermarking protocol that follows a new secure, buyer-centric and mediated design approach able to meet such challenges. ACM Reference Format: Franco Frattolillo. 2016. A buyer-friendly and mediated watermarking protocol for web context.

Workstations belonging to networked clusters cannot often be exploited since they are not provide... more Workstations belonging to networked clusters cannot often be exploited since they are not provided with valid IP addresses and are hidden from the Internet by IP addressable front-end machines. The paper presents a PVM extension that enables such clustered machines hidden from the Internet to take part in a PVM computation as hosts. This way, programmers can exploit low-cost, networked computing resources widely available within departmental organizations in a well-known programming environment, such as PVM, without having to adapt their large-scale applications to new grid programming environments.