Image selective encryption analysis using mutual information in CNN based embedding space

Abstract

As digital data transmission continues to scale, concerns about privacy grow increasingly urgent - yet privacy remains a socially constructed and ambiguously defined concept, lacking a universally accepted quantitative measure. This work examines information leakage in image data, a domain where information-theoretic guarantees are still underexplored. At the intersection of deep learning, information theory, and cryptography, we investigate the use of mutual information (MI) estimators - in particular, the empirical estimator and the MINE framework - to detect leakage from selectively encrypted images. Motivated by the intuition that a robust estimator would require a probabilistic frameworks that can capture spatial dependencies and residual structures, even within encrypted representations - our work represent a promising direction for image information leakage estimation.