Biography

Ethan Katte is an undergraduate student completing a Bachelor of Advanced Computing with a focus on Computer Science and Cybersecurity. He is currently undertaking his Honours research under the supervision of Muhammad Umair and Professor Athman Bouguettaya. Ethan has gained relevant experience through internships at Google and Cisco and is applying this knowledge to his research.

Project Title:

Service-Based Image Provenance of Social Media Platforms

Project Description:

We introduce a new service framework to ascertain the network provenance of social media images. This framework identifies the online platforms where the image has appeared, providing crucial information to trace the origin of an image. The novelty of the design lies in its exclusive reliance on image metadata. We begin by analyzing how different social media platforms handle image metadata during the upload process. We abstract this processing on the image metadata as a distinct service, whose functional attribute is to preserve the privacy of the user. This analysis is then translated into unique fingerprints that represent each platform’s specific handling and pruning of image metadata. The framework leverages these fingerprints to track the trajectory of images across various social media platforms. Experiments are conducted on a subset of the Multimodal C4, Metadata Extractor, and Image Ballistics of Social Data datasets. Results demonstrate up to 71% accuracy in identifying the platform from which an image was downloaded, revealing its network provenance.