Challenging the security of Content-Based Image Retrieval systems

Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) has been recently used as a filtering mechanism against the piracy of multimedia contents. Many publications in the last few years have proposed very robust schemes where pirated contents are detected despite severe modifications. As none of these systems have addressed the piracy problem from a security perspective, it is time to check whether they are secure: Can pirates mount violent attacks against CBIR systems by carefully studying the technology they use? This paper is an initial analysis of the security flaws of the typical technology blocks used in state-of-the-art CBIR systems. It is so far too early to draw any definitive conclusion about their inherent security, but it motivates and encourages further studies on this topic.