The optimal attack to histogram-based forensic detectors is simple(x)

Abstract

In the last years a number of counterforensics tools have been proposed. Although most of them are heuristic and designed ad hoc, lately a formal approach to this problem, rooted in transportation theory, has been pursued. This paper follows this path by designing optimal attacks against histogrambased detectors where the detection region is non-convex. The usefulness of our strategy is demonstrated by providing for the first time the optimal solution to the design of attacks against Benford's Law-based detectors, a problem that has deserved large practical interest by the forensic community. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with that of the best existing counterforensic method against Benford-based detectors, showing the goodness (indeed, the optimality) of our approach.