SCHOOL OF LAW, MUMBAI

A Research paper submitted on

Digital Forgery FOR SEMESTER VII OF 2020-21, IN THE SUBJECT CYBER

LAW SUBMITTED TO:

Professor Ekta

Saini SUBMITTED

BY:

Mayank Srivastava

A058

BBA LLB (Hons.)

Fourth Year

1
TABLE OF CONTENT PARTICULARS
SR.NO
1. INTRODUCTION
2. SCOPE AND LIMITATION
3. RESEARCH QUESTION
4. FORGERY DETECTION
5. CHALLENGES AHEAD
6. CONCLUSION

Today, we are leaving in digital era, over the past decade, digital technology has matured to become
predominant technology for creating, processing, transmitting and storing information, a form of
knowledge and intellectual assets. Multidimensional knowledge and intellectual assets are produced and
represented in various forms such as audio, video, text , image , all together we can call it as a multimedia
forms, finally all forms are stored as a digital bits and byte forms i.e digital content .

1. INTRODUCTION

Today, we are living in digital era. Over the past decade, digital Technology has matured to
become predominant technology for creating, processing, transmitting and storing a information,
a form of knowledge and intellectual assets. Information a form of knowledge represented and
created in multidimensional forms such as audio, video, text, image etc. digital technology has
made it easy and possible to represent all and every form of information, that is knowledge and
intellectual assets into a digitized form. The digital technology undoubtedly superior to earlier
used conventional analog form and it has many advantages such as easy accessibility, searching,
manipulation, etc.
The recent advances in software developments by way of plug and play(run) tools to capture,
process, access and transmission of digitizes information, has made it easiler to alter the
information without leaving behind any traces of tampering with digital data. The forgeries are
not new to human kind but very old problem. In past it was limited to art and literature but not
affecting general public. The digital technologies, multimedia, new set of digital acquisition,
processing devices and tools and their easy availability, wide spread transmissions through social
networking sites over web and open source software, all together has raised a horrendous and
challenging problem of digital forgeries. It has raised new questions such as “Is seeing
believable?” “Are hearable voices authentic?” since these affecting the public in general and
therefore there is urgent need to address the above questions.

Hierarchical Overview of various forms of digital forgeries.

SCOPE AND LIMITATIONS

The limitation of this research paper is that it lacks the primary data. The research paper is totally
based on the doctrinal research.
The field of advanced phony had drawn the consideration analyst around the world. The issues
being featured in this area are advanced imitations of social effects, identification procedures,
and anticipation strategies. The computerized imitations have numerous viewpoints and
suggestions on social, legitimate, specialized, insight, analytical components, security, and
administrative issues.
The research in the field of digital forgeries is still in the infancy stage. Many innovative and
promising technical problems of significant social importance are being identified. Also many
realistic specific techniques, solutions have been proposed. The research in the domain of digital
forensics is finally shaping towards the solving more generalized problem. Accordingly it
emerging that generalized solutions and techniques, building standardized data sets, benchmarks,
evaluation criteria, etc. are to be proposed to realize the new frameworks minimizing the chances
for digital forgeries.

RESEARCH QUESTION
1) What are the challenges related to Digital Forgery?
2) How is forgery detected and generated?

2. Natural or Computer generated?

The images and data of financial, legal evidences, medical reports, such other a high valuable
assets originality and authenticity is of prime importance. Identifying the originality and
authenticity of image or data in many cases becomes challenging problem. The advance in
computer graphics, animation, multimedia in association of high computing machines,
algorithms, increases the complexity of the issue. It is possible to generate high precision
realistic images and data of any events.
Identifying and differentiating the data and image acquired by acquisition devices and realistic
computer generated one is a multidimensional problem that has drawn attention of researchers
worldwide.

3. Forgery Detection

The simple accessibility of computerized altering instruments, modification, and control turned
out to be extremely simple and accordingly phony identification turns into a perplexing and
compromising issue. Portraying the fundamental activities associated with imitations. Explicit to
picture falsification discovery picture can be controlled in different manners with numerous basic
tasks like relative changes, (for example, interpretation, scaling, revolution, shearing) pay
activities (like shading, brilliance, contrast alterations, obscuring and upgrade) concealment
activity, (for example, separating, pressure and clamor expansion). Furthermore more mind
boggling activities are additionally conceivable, for example, compositing, mixing, tangling,
trimming, photomontage prompting outwardly untraceable relics in a picture. The programmed
and logical technique for identifying the produced pictures has become a greatest provoking
issue to specialists and a similar issue is valid for each media substance.
 Linage (Flow) Mapping

The high speed accessibility of internet and easy availability of freely available high
processing digital editing tools (image) worsen the problem of authenticity of digital
resources, the technology of digital resources is moving at a much faster rate due to social
networking sites, its very difficult to find the origin of the resources. Thus finding the history
(flow) of digital resources becomes a critical problem. Some efforts of finding the linage
(flow) of data are being made in networked environment but as of our knowledge still nobody
has tried to find the linage of digital resources. Researchers have not so for recognized as a
potential problem in digital resources. In wake of finding solutions leads to solve today’s
leading problems related to the authenticity of the intellectual assets.

Source (Origin) Identification

In legal proceedings quite often, the proving authenticity of evidences and their sources becomes essential. The new varieties of
image acquisition devices such as digital camera, scanners, cell phones, etc increase the complexity in the problem.

4. CHALLENGES AHEAD

The biggest problem and challenge is how to ensure that intellectual assets in digital form are
authentic and to tampered and their entire contents are authentic and consistent, the
provenance of consistency, integrity authenticity (CIA) can only assure the digital intellectual
assets origin and originality (unforged).

4.1 Data Provenance

The simmhan define data provenance as

“Information that helps determine the derivation history of a data product, starting from its
original sources”

The data provenance is necessary for protection of rights and may be regulatory requirement
in applications like science, medicine, financial transactions government legal prosecutions
and many more daily situations, wherever the information is valuable and trustworthy.
 Technological obsolescence: The technological developments in new devices, process,
software and hardware is taking place at much faster rate than as assumed by Moore’s Law.
Most of existing digital technological infrastructures, methods and process of recording,
storing, and retrieval of digital resources is being totally replaced in 2-5 years. That makes
the preservation of digital evidences and investigations challenging issue.

The technological obsolescence represents a far greater threat to information in digital form
than the inherent physical fragility of many digital media.1

Formats: The intellectual assets in digital form available in various forms and each form
having different file formats may … consistently changing technical evolution of hardware
and software. The greater responsibility lies in preserving and achieving convertibility of one
form to other formats and making the reservation formats independent of hardware and
software and forward and backward interoperability
4.2 Migration of digital information

The preservation of integrity of digital documents over a migration of digital documents within
organization and on internet with retaining capability of retrieval and display of integrated digital
document poses greater challenge with constantly changing technology.

4.3 Ethical, legal and institutional issues

The wide spread uncertainties about legal, ethical and institutional issues of managing,
preserving the intellectual assets (e.g., text and other document-like objects, photographs, film,
software, multimedia objects) poses new threats and challenges.

4.4 Differentiating Forgery and clarity modification `

There are thinnest differences in identifying the forgeries and the alteration made in digital assets
for the purpose of increasing the clarity of information representation. The biggest challenges are
how to identify the few operations are made on digital assets to increase the visual clarity of
documents without altering the meaning of digital assets and their origin.

4.5 Benchmarking and Standard data set

11
Mallinson, John C. ,1986, “Preserving Machine-Readable

Archival Records for the Millenia.” Archivaria 22(Summer): 147-52.

There is need of open data sets for critical and typical realistic conditions such as images (digital
documents) in uncompressed with different resolutions, sizes and image acquisition model
(camera model) with diverse contents for all possible forgeries such as copy paste, compositing,
splicing, photomontage, blending, matting etc with manipulation, and manipulation
compensation conditions like adjustments color, contrast, brightness, blurring, enhancement and
possible post suppression operations like compression, recoloring addition of noise, etc. there is a
need to evolve benchmarks for forged dataset as well as unforged data set in order to assess,
evaluate, and understand the effectiveness of the research with collaborative studies.

4.6 Performance evaluation

The limited number of studies reported on forgery detection techniques and digital forgery
detection research field is still in the state of infancy that might be reason for non-development
of performance evaluation bench marks, standardized data set, standard terminologies and
techniques for determination of performances of existing techniques. There is need to borrow
performance measurement criteria from other similar fields like fraud detection in credit cards,
telecom frauds performance measurement terminology like true false rate, false positive, false
negative, etc.

Some case studies:-

1) First Response were instructed to examine a specific document which was being relied upon
in a civil case for compensation as a result of breach of contract. The document related to a
Service Occupancy Agreement which accompanied the job role from which the plaintiff had
been dismissed. The document was believed to have been falsified to support the litigation.
Key to this matter was the meta-data (the data embedded within the document recording the
author, creation date and so on) which provided a clear picture and the modifications. A full
report was provided resulting in the plaintiff no longer relying on the document as part of
their case.
2) Analysis of computers provided by a law enforcement agency in relation to counterfeit
pharmaceutical products resulted in the discovery of hundreds of high-end graphics
application files containing layouts and designs for the drugs packaging. Also found were a
number of fake importation certificates, customs clearance documents and a treasure trove of
false identity documentation, including forged university certificates, drivers licenses, utility
bills and passports. Recovered email uncovered links to various other players in the
conspiracy who were also arrested. A technical report was produced which was used as
evidence to charge the suspects, who all pleaded guilty at court.
3) In a civil litigation at the High Court, First Response were instructed by the Judge to act as
joint expert and determine which of two near identical copies of a land ownership contract
was the unaltered original. Both Word documents were 38 pages in length and were
paragraph-for-paragraph identical with one critical exception. The paragraph dealing with the
ratio of compensation for the signing parties was clearly different. Analysis of the
document’s internal properties showed clearly that one document had been recently edited.
Delving deeper allowed us to show the deleted content prior to the edits being made, which
brought it into line with the other version presented to the court. This resulted in an award to
one party and the threat of criminal proceedings to the other.

Number of digital forgery incidents reported across India

CONCLUSION
In this paper, introduction and discussion is made of forgery research problems and associated
challenges in solving a forgery problem. Increasingly significance of credibility of digital
resources is becoming questionable? The need for assurance of authentic digital resources is
more vital than ever. Ultimately it is hoped that due to increasing importance new significant
problems of research and its associated challenges for researchers and practitioners in the digital
communities soon become major area for research. Digital forgery involves changing elements
of a document or image and representing the changes as true copies of the original. A number of
image forgery detection schemes have been developed to compensate for human visual
inspection, which is subjective and unreliable. Digital image forensics is a growing research field
that supports the struggle against digital forgery and tampering.