Search

In today's interconnected world, safeguarding digital data's confidentiality and security is crucial. Cryptography and steganography are two primary methods used for information security. While these methods have diverse applications, there is ongoing exploration into the potential benefits of merging them. This review focuses on journal articles from 2010 onwards and conference papers from 2018 onwards that integrate steganography and cryptography in practical applications. The results are gathered through different databases like Scopus, IEEE, and Web of Science. Our approach involves gaining insights into real-world applications explored in the existing literature and categorizing them based on domains and technological areas. Furthermore, we comprehensively analyze the advantages and limitations associated with these implementations, examining them from three evaluation perspectives: security, performance, and user experience. This categorization offers guidance for future research in unexplored areas, while the evaluation perspectives provide essential considerations for analyzing real-world implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security inks based on photoluminescent materials are mostly investigated for security applications, such as information encryption and decryption, anti‐counterfeiting, and data storage. Although they are invisible to the naked eye under ambient light, they can be detected under ultraviolet or near‐infrared light. Herein, a new kind of secret paper made from network‐structured ultralong hydroxyapatite nanowires and cellulose fibers has been developed. White vinegar, a common cooking ingredient, is used as an invisible security ink. Covert information on the secret paper written with white vinegar is totally invisible under natural light, but it can be decrypted and clearly read after exposure to fire; the response time to fire is short (<10 s). The ways of writing on the secret paper are diverse by using various pens loaded with white vinegar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing threat intrusions to enterprise computing systems have led to a formulation of guarded enterprise systems. The approach was to put in place steel gates and prevent hostile entities from entering the enterprise domain. The current complexity level has made the fortress approach to security implemented throughout the defense, banking, and other high trust industries unworkable. The alternative security approach presented in this paper is the result of a concentrated fourteen year program of pilots and research. Its distributed approach has no need for passwords or accounts and derives from a set of tenets that form the basic security model requirements. At each step in the process it determines identities and claims for access and privileges. These techniques are resilient, secure, extensible, and scalable. They are currently being implemented for a major enterprise, and are a candidate for other enterprise security approaches. This paper discusses the Enterprise Level Security architecture, a web-based security architecture designed to select and incorporate technology into a cohesive set of policies and rules for an enterprise information system. The paper discusses the history, theoretical underpinnings, implementation decisions, current status, and future plans for expansion of capabilities and scale.

This research paper explores the evolution of voting systems, assessing vulnerabilities in traditional methods and investigating blockchain technology as a solution. Traditional voting systems encounter challenges concerning security, transparency, and accessibility, prompting a transition towards blockchain-based online voting. Blockchain, originating from cryptocurrencies, decentralizes control, thereby enhancing transparency, integrity, and security in elections. Real-world case studies from Estonia and West Virginia offer insights into implementation and successes. Ethical considerations, including privacy and consent, alongside societal impacts like inclusivity and democratization, are scrutinized. The proposed blockchain-based voting system prioritizes decentralization, tamper resistance, and interoperability. Security measures incorporate cryptographic techniques and multi-factor authentication. Transparency is assured through a publicly accessible blockchain ledger, facilitating an auditable voting process. The paper addresses challenges like voter accessibility and election anonymity, proposing mitigation strategies. Future directions entail integrating blockchain with AI and machine learning for interoperability and standardization. Collaboration among policymakers, technologists, and researchers is pivotal for advocating secure, transparent, and accessible blockchain-based voting systems, with the goal of fostering globally participatory elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network compression coding technology is a research hotspot in the field of digital steganography and image synthesis. How to improve image quality while achieving short compression time is a problem currently faced. Based on the improved wavelet neural network theory, this paper constructs a digital steganography and image synthesis model. The model first tracks the contour of the digit to be recognized, then equalizes and resamples the contour to make it translation-invariant and scaling-invariant, and then uses multi-wavelet neural network clusters to stretch the contour shell to obtain orders of magnitude multi-resolution and its average, and finally, these shell coefficients are fed into a feedforward neural network cluster to identify this handwritten digit, solving the problem of multi-resolution decomposition of contour shells while having a high sampling rate. In the simulation process, the classification model that a single pixel is a text/non-text pixel is trained on the original gray value of the gray pixel and its neighboring pixels, and the classified text pixels are connected to a text area through an adaptive MeanShift method. The experimental results show that it is feasible to use multi-wavelet features for handwritten digit recognition. The model combines the neural network and the genetic algorithm, making full use of the advantages of both, so that the new algorithm has the learning ability and robustness of the neural network. The compression ratio after compression by ordinary wavelet coding, PSNR, MSE, and compression time are 8.4, 25 dB, 210, and 7 s, respectively. The values are 11.7, 24 dB, 207, and 11 s, respectively. At the same time, the peak signal-to-noise ratio is higher and the mean square error is lower, that is, the compression quality is better, and the accuracy of digital steganography and image synthesis is effectively improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is our first IET Information Security special issue from the Internation Conference on Information Security and Cryptology, which was held from December 1 to December 3, Seoul, South Korea, 2021. TOPIC B Paper 3 by K. Yamamura, Y. Wang, and E. Fujisaki investigates an enumeration algorithm that is used as a subroutine for the BKZ algorithm, which is one of the most practical reduction algorithms. [Extracted from the article]

Nowadays, it is difficult to imagine a powerful algorithm of cryptography that can continue cryptanalyzing and attacking without the use of unconventional techniques. Although some of the substitution algorithms are old, such as Vigenere, Alberti, and Trithemius ciphers, they are considered powerful and cannot be broken. In this paper we produce the novelty algorithm, by using of biological computation as an unconventional search tool combined with an uninhibited analysis method is the vertical probabilistic model, that makes attacking and analyzing these ciphers possible and very easy to transform the problem from a complex to a linear one, which is a novelty achievement. The letters of the encoded message are processed in the form of segments of equal length, to report the available hardware components. Each letter codon represents a region of the memory strand, and the letters calculated for it are symbolized within the probabilistic model so that each pair has a triple encoding: the first is given as a memory strand encoding and the others are its complement in the sticker encoding; These encodings differ from one region to another. The solution space is calculated and then the parallel search process begins. Some memory complexities are excluded even though they are within the solution paths formed, because the natural language does not contain its sequences. The precision of the solution and the time consuming of access to it depend on the length of the processed text, and the precision of the solution is often inversely proportional to the speed of access to it. As an average of the time spent to reach the solution, a text with a length of 200 cipher characters needs approximately 15 minutes to give 98% of the correct components of the specific hardware. The aim of the paper is to transform OTP substitution analysis from a NP problem to a O(nm) problem, which makes it easier to find solutions to it easily with the available capabilities and to develop methods that are harnessed to attack difficult and powerful ciphers that differ in class and type from the OTP polyalphabetic substitution ciphers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of the medical field had led to the transformation of communication from paper information into the digital form. Medical information security had become a great concern as the medical field is moving towards the digital world and hence patient information, disease diagnosis and so on are all being stored in the digital image. Therefore, to improve the medical information security, securing of patient information and the increasing requirements for communication to be transferred between patients, client, medical practitioners, and sponsors is essential to be secured. The core aim of this research is to make available a complete knowledge about the research trends on LSB Steganography Technique, which are applied to securing medical information such as text, image, audio, video and graphics and also discuss the efficiency of the LSB technique. The survey findings show that LSB steganography technique is efficient in securing medical information from intruder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security of linear ramp secret sharing schemes can be characterized by the relative generalized Hamming weights of the involved codes. In this paper, we elaborate on the implication of these parameters and devise a method to estimate their value for general one-point algebraic geometric codes. As it is demonstrated, for Hermitian codes, our bound is often tight. Furthermore, for these codes, the relative generalized Hamming weights are often much larger than the corresponding generalized Hamming weights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audio cryptography is the practice of encrypting audio data to prevent illegal access to and listening to it. This paper presents an innovative technique of audio cryptography based on the Python computer language. To ensure secrecy and integrity, the suggested system encrypts and decrypts audio signals using advanced cryptographic techniques. A crucial component of AES, the cryptographic key is dynamically created to improve security. Python's broad library support and ease of use make it an ideal platform for implementing the AES algorithm, which ensures dependable and effective audio data encryption. The system utilizes Python's cryptography library for seamless integration and ease of implementation. Simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the AES algorithm in securely encrypting and decrypting audio data with reduced noise compared to traditional methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, a robust steganographic algorithm that achieves errorless robustness against JPEG recompression has been proposed. The method employs a lattice embedding scheme and utilizes the syndrome-trellis code (STC) for practical embedding. However, we have noticed that errorless robust embedding with STC may encounter failures due to modifications on wet coefficients, especially when a high quality factor is used by the compression channel. To solve this problem, we have discovered that using steganographic polar code (SPC) for embedding has better performance in avoiding modifications on wet coefficients. In this paper, we conduct theoretical analysis to prove the better performance of SPC in wet paper embedding. We establish the condition of avoiding modifications on wet coefficients, followed by presenting a recursive calculation method for determining the distribution of columns in the generator matrix of SPC. The findings reveal that SPC can avoid modifications on wet coefficients under a larger number of wet coefficients compared with STC, and therefore we propose a better errorless robust embedding method employing SPC. The experimental results demonstrate that under close security performance, the proposed method achieves a higher success rate compared with embedding with STC. Specifically, when the quality factor of the compressor is 95 and the payload size is 0.4 bpnzac, our method achieves a success rate of 99.85%, surpassing the 91.95% success rate of the embedding with STC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We give an overview of our critiques of "proofs" of security and a guide to our papers on the subject that have appeared over the past decade and a half. We also provide numerous additional examples and a few updates and errata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, a new and improvised image watermarking (IW) technique on colored images is proposed to mitigate robustness and imperceptibility issues found often in the past presented schemes. Most schemes exhibit low robustness due to LSB's (Least Significant Bit) and MSB's (Most Significant Bit) based information hiding in the cover image. However, most of these IW schemes have low imperceptibility as the cover image distortion reveals to the attacker due to information hiding in MSB's. Such IW schemes used to hide the secret message via MSBs and LSBs are susceptible to malicious intruder attacks which results in low robustness, whereas, the attacks on MSB's have an impact of reduced imperceptibility. Therefore, this paper propounds a digital IW method named as 2D Otsu algorithm, which allows embedding of a grayscale image into a colored host in the wavelet domain. According to this algorithm, the host image is disintegrated into three color bands of blue, red, and green. Each band is divided into small patches leading to the calculation of entropy followed by finding of the threshold that is estimated by taking the average of entropies of all the patches. Wavelet representation of each patch with entropy less than the threshold is given by applying DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform). Later, by decomposing gray-scale image into binary bits, secret information embedded by quantization technique into optimal wavelet coefficient blocks either encoding wavelet coefficient differences to 0-bits or 1-bits called MultiBit Encoding (MBE). The results obtained show that the imperceptibility and robustness of this proposed model are superior to other proposed watermarking models and this model gives better results than other models at the same payload. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, several research topics are presented that provide productive avenues of exploration for students in an undergraduate cryptography course. The topics are intended for a variety of skill levels and interests. In some cases, a student might be inspired to try to solve the proposed problem or write computer code. Other topics might motivate them to learn new mathematics or algorithms, or research a historical event or person. In all cases, a short description of the topic is given along with several references that can be used as a starting point for student research. The author also describes some challenges and recommendations when teaching a course where a project is a main component. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A lattice of integers is the collection of all linear combinations of a set of vectors for which all entries of the vectors are integers and all coefficients in the linear combinations are also integers. Lattice reduction refers to the problem of finding a set of vectors in a given lattice such that the collection of all integer linear combinations of this subset is still the entire original lattice and so that the Euclidean norms of the subset are reduced. The present paper proposes simple, efficient iterations for lattice reduction which are guaranteed to reduce the Euclidean norms of the basis vectors (the vectors in the subset) monotonically during every iteration. Each iteration selects the basis vector for which projecting off (with integer coefficients) the components of the other basis vectors along the selected vector minimizes the Euclidean norms of the reduced basis vectors. Each iteration projects off the components along the selected basis vector and efficiently updates all information required for the next iteration to select its best basis vector and perform the associated projections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Priced oblivious transfer (POT) is a cryptographic protocol designed for privacy-preserving e-commerce of digital content. It involves two parties: the merchant, who provides a set of priced items as input, and a customer, who acquires one of them. After the protocol has run, the customer obtains the item they chose, while the merchant cannot determine which one. Moreover, the protocol guarantees that the customer gets the content only if they have paid the price established by the merchant. In a recent paper, the authors proposed a POT system where the payments employed e-coin transactions. The strong point of the proposal was the absence of zero-knowledge proofs required in preceding systems to guarantee the correctness of payments. In this paper, we propose a novel e-coin-based POT system with a fast item retrieval procedure whose running time does not depend on the number of items for sale. This is an improvement over the aforementioned existing proposal whose execution time becomes prohibitively long when the catalog is extensive. The use of zero-knowledge proofs is neither required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Steganography is an approach used to provide security to the confidential data in such a manner that only sender and receiver are able to use the data. In image steganography, image is used as a cover envelope to embed secret information. Today Barcodes system is very popular for protecting sensitive information. This paper introduces the concept of hiding data in 3D Barcode image using pattern generation approach. 3D Barcodes do not use any labels. They are embossed or engraved directly on the product during the manufacturing process.3D Barcodes use the same basic principal as 1D or 2D barcodes use. The performance evaluation is done by using statistical parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secret writing is the art of covered or hidden writing. The art of secret writing is meant to create a message unreadable by a third party however doesn’t hide the existence of the secret communication. This paper is meant as a technical introduction to secret writing for those unacquainted with the field. Invisible inks are generally used for secret writing. These are fluids used to write hidden messages that do not appear unless exposed by a revealing process. Invisible inks can be classified into three main categories: those that are revealed by heat, those revealed by chemical reactions and those that are visible under ultraviolet light. Some common household invisible inks are diluted fruit juices, vinegar and laundry detergent, all which can be applied by a paintbrush, special invisible ink pen or even a toothpick, Historically, used in times of war by governments and insurgents alike. The chemical processes of invisible inks are well known, so a variety of detection methods exist. The simplest invisible ink experiment consists of dipping a brush in vegetable juice, biological fluids and different chemicals and writing on a piece of blank varieties of paper. When the “ink” dries, it will be invisible to the naked eye, but if the paper is held up to a moderate heat source such as a light bulb, a radiator or an iron using UV lamp to deciphering invisible writing. Many other mild chemicals also used for restoration of secret writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]