2014 International Symposium on Biometrics and Security Technologies (ISBAST) 290 DWT+LSB-based Fragile Watermarking Method For Digital Quran Images Fajri Kurniawan 1,2 , Mohammed S. Khalil 1,2 , Muhammad Khurram Khan 1,2 , and Yasser M. Alginahi 2,3 1 Center of Excellence Information Assurance King Saud University Riyadh, Saudi Arabia fkurniawan.c@ksu.edu.sa sayimkhalil@gmail.com mkhurram@ksu.edu.sa 2 IT Research Center for the Holy Quran and Its Sciences (NOOR), Madinah, Taibah University, Saudi Arabia 3 Department of Computer Science College of Computer Science and Engineering Taibah University, Madinah, Saudi Arabia yginahi@taibahu.edu.sa Abstract—In this digital era, the authenticity of digital documents can be doubtful because it may suffer from tampering activity. Looking into Muslim community, the most important book/scripture is the Holy Quran. The Muslim community has put great efforts to ensure the authenticity of the printed Holy Quran. However, such effort is not accompanied for digital Holy Quran. In this paper, we propose a fragile watermarking method to preserve the authenticity of the digital Holy Quran. The Proposed method is considered as fragile watermarking method, which works on wavelet and spatial domains of digital Quran images. The authentication bits are embedded into each block of wavelet- transformed image. Then, the least significant bits of pixels are considered to embed another authentication bits. The experimental results show that the watermarked image is imperceptible and fragile to the common attacks. Keywords; DWT, fragile watermarking, authentication, Quran, mobile application I. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND Recently, smart phones and handheld devices have become a necessity for most of the people. Moreover, software developers are also aggressively developing various mobile applications to fill the huge market share. One of the most downloaded applications is associated with the religion such as holy books/scriptures applications. Unfortunately, the integrity of such mobile applications that relate with some religions are still doubtful because of lack of official authority that monitors such issues. Google Play's statistics shows that one of the most downloaded applications in Muslim majority countries is Holy Quran. Hence, this research encourages the importance of preserving authenticity and integrity of digital Quran applications in accordance to increase a user's trust. According to our observation, the existing digital Quran applications available online are susceptible to tampering. Therefore, it becomes hard to find the tampered portion without checking manually every page one by one. Off course, such task is time consuming and requires Quran’s memorization and needs high concentration. The manual verification can only be done by experts who remember the Holy Quran completely. Meanwhile, the regular Quran’s reader is unaware of fake verse while reciting the holy Quran. Fake verses on digital Quran also exist, which are done to mess up the Muslims community. According to recent studies, digital document can be protected to avoid such tamper problems. The protection is intended to counter intentional tampering activity and any users capable to detect the tamper if occurs. Digital watermarking has been raised as one of top solutions to protect a digital document such as Quran’s images [1-20, 25]. It can ensure integrity of digital document after distribution on Internet by attaching authentication code along with the host image rather separating it. Generally, there are three categories in digital watermarking based on their robustness characteristics. The first is called fragile watermarking, because it is extremely sensitive against minor tampering. The second watermarking is known as semi-fragile. The Semi-fragile watermarking actually derives the characteristics of fragile watermarking. The key difference in semi-fragile watermarking is its robustness against unintentional tampering (i.e. JPEG compression). Those two approaches have been proposed for the authentication of digital content such as image, audio or video [2, 3, 26-28, 36]. Meanwhile, the last watermarking approach is defined as robust watermarking. In accordance with the term, such approach is designed to resist any falsification either intentional or unintentional. The main application of robust watermarking is within the domain of copyright protection, data mining and fingerprinting [1, 29, 30]. The existing watermarking methods have different capabilities depending on application needs such as some methods can do both detection and localization of the forgery. However, another method can only report whether the protected image is still authentic or not. On the other side, the watermarking approaches are categorized into block-based and pixel-based depending on how the watermark code is embedded into host image. The block- 978-1-4799-6444-4/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE