A Survey on Digital Image Steganographic Methods

The embedding schemes utilizes the characteristic of the human vision’s sensitivity to color value variations and resistant to all known steganalysis methods. The main requirement of steganography is undetectability, which loosely defines that no algorithm exists that can determine whether a work contains a hidden message.

Emergency Response to Mumbai Terror Attacks

The Mumbai terror attacks of November 2008 lasted for over 60 hours and resulted in the death of over 172 people. The attack revealed several shortcomings of the emergency response preparedness in Mumbai. This chapter concentrates on the emergency response provided and uses activity theory to analyze it. The authors explore the diverse dimensions of emergency, determine the lessons learned from the incident and evaluate the emergency response. They suggest how operations could be improved thus setting a standard for any future emergency response.

Pirates of the Copyright and Cyberspace

The chapter discusses the issues involved in the protection of copyrights of intellectual creation over the Internet. The chapter focuses upon concept of liability and jurisdiction in cyberspace in context of the threat of violation of the rights of copyright holders. The chapter examines the role of technological advancement vis-à-vis the legal scenario make several observations and suggestions in regard.

A Comparison of Cyber-Crime Definitions in India and the United States

Unlike traditional crimes, it is difficult to define legal jurisdiction and authority for prosecuting cyber crimes. This issue is further complicated by differences in definitions of cyber crime in different countries. This chapter motivates the issue with an example of the ILOVEYOU virus and compares the legal provisions to combat cyber-crime in the US and India. The authors find that there are significant differences between India and the US in definitions of cybercrimes. It appears that in the United States, it is a crime to access information that has been declared to be confidential. In India, criminality requires dissemination of the information obtained without authorization. Another notable difference between the prosecutions of cybercrimes in the two countries relates to obscenity and decency laws.

The UID Project

The Indian government has undertaken a major effort to issue Unique Identification Numbers (UID) to its citizens. This chapter examines the Social Security Number system in the US, and investigates other UID projects in Europe. Based on these understanding and other information around UID systems, the authors discuss possible issues that are expected to arise in the implementation of UID system in India. They articulate how biometrics is being advocated by the proponents of the system in India for unique identification. The authors elucidate the social, ethical, cultural, technical, and legal implications / challenges around the implementation of a unique identification project in India.

Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox and Certain Aspects of Quantum Cryptology with Some Applications

The developments in quantum computing or any breakthrough in factorization algorithm would have far-reaching consequences in cryptology. For instance, Shor algorithm of factorizing in quantum computing might render the RSA type classical cryptography almost obsolete since it mainly depends on the computational complexity of factorization. Therefore, quantum cryptography is of immense importance and value in the modern context of recent scientific revolution. In this chapter, the authors discuss in brief certain fascinating aspects of Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox in the context of quantum cryptology. The EPR protocol and its connections to the famous Bell’s inequality are also considered in here.

Complexity Measures of Cryptographically Secure Boolean Functions

Boolean functions are used in modern cryptosystems for providing confusion and diffusion. To achieve required security by resistance to various attacks such as algebraic attacks, correlation attacks, linear, differential attacks, several criteria for Boolean functions have been established over years by cryptographic community. These criteria include nonlinearity, avalanche criterion and correlation immunity and the like. The chapter is an attempt to present state of the art on properties of such Boolean functions and to suggest several directions for further research.

Towards Checking Tampering of Software

Assuring integrity of software is a very challenging issue. Different manifestations of tampering exist such as intentional attack with the aim of harming the user (through some kind of a malware; Baker, 1995) or the user himself tampers with the software to gain features he is not authorized with (Baxter, Yahin, Moura, Sant’Anna, & Bier, 1998). In this chapter, the authors make a survey of various strategies used to assure the integrity of software such as trusted computing platform, software attestation, software similarity, software watermark, software birthmark etc. Subsequently, the authors present a novel method for malware detection from a semantic approach that can be adapted for checking the integrity of software. They shall discuss some of the initial experimental results in this direction.

Extended Time Machine Design using Reconfigurable Computing for Efficient Recording and Retrieval of Gigabit Network Traffic

Till date there are no systems which promise to efficiently store and retrieve high volume network traffic. Like Time Machine, this efficiently records and retrieves high volume network traffic. The bottleneck of such systems has been to capture packets at such a high speed without dropping and to write a large amount of data to a disk quicklt and sufficiently, without impact on the integrity of the captured data (Ref. Cooke.E., Myrick.A., Rusek.D., & Jahanian.F(2006)). Certain hardware and software parts of the operating system (like drivers, input/output interfaces) cannot cope with such a high volume of data from a network, which may cause loss of data. Based on such experiences the authors have come up with a redesigned implementation of the system which have specialized capture hardware with its own Application Programming Interface for overcoming loss of data and improving efficiency in recording mechanisms.