Implementation and Evaluation of Steganography Based Online Voting System

Though there are online voting systems available, the authors propose a new and secure steganography based E2E (end-to-end) verifiable online voting system, to tackle the problems in voting process. This research implements a novel approach to online voting by combining visual cryptography with image steganography to enhance system security without degrading system usability and performance. The voting system will also include password hashed-based scheme and threshold decryption scheme. The software is developed on web-based Java EE with the integration of MySQL database server and Glassfish as its application server. The authors assume that the election server used and the election authorities are trustworthy. A questionnaire survey of 30 representative participants was done to collect data to measure the user acceptance of the software developed through usability testing and user acceptance testing.

Cryptographic Techniques Based on Bio-Inspired Systems

In this chapter, bio-inspired techniques based on the cellular automata (CAs) and programmable cellular automata (PCAs) theory are used to develop information security systems. The proposed cryptosystem is composed from a combination of a CA as a pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) and a PCA that construct the ciphering functions of the designed enciphering scheme. It is presented how simple elements named „cells” interact between each other using certain rules and topologies to form a larger system that can be used to encrypt/decrypt data sent over network communication systems. The proposed security system was implemented in hardware in FPGA devices of type Spartan 3E – XC3S500E and was analyzed and verified, including NIST statistical tests, to assure that the system has good security and high speed. The experimental results proves that the cryptographic techniques based on bio-inspired algorithms provides an alternative to the conventional techniques (computational methods).

Applicability of Cellular Automata in Cryptanalysis

Cryptanalysis refers to finding the plaintext from the given cipher text. The problem reduces to finding the correct key from a set of possible keys, which is basically a search problem. Many researchers have put in a lot of effort to accomplish this task. Most of the efforts used conventional techniques. However, soft computing techniques like Genetic Algorithms are generally good in optimized search, though the applicability of such techniques to cryptanalysis is still a contentious point. This work carries out an extensive literature review of the cryptanalysis techniques, finds the gaps there in, in order to put the proposed technique in the perspective. The work also finds the applicability of Cellular Automata in cryptanalysis. A new technique has been proposed and verified for texts of around 1000 words. Each text is encrypted 10 times and then decrypted using the proposed technique. The work has also been compared with that employing Genetic Algorithm. The experiments carried out prove the veracity of the technique and paves way of Cellular automata in cryptanalysis. The paper also discusses the future scope of the work.

Hybrid Approach of Modified AES

Advanced Encryption Standard is one of the most popular symmetric key encryption algorithms to many works, which have employed to implement modified AES. In this paper, the modification that has been proposed on AES algorithm that has been developed to decrease its time complexity on bulky data and increased security will be included using the image as input data. The modification proposed itself including alteration in the mix column and shift rows transformation of AES encryption algorithm, embedding confusion-diffusion. This work has been implemented on the most recent Xilinx Spartan FPGA.

Authentication of Smart Grid

The electrical power grid forms the functional foundation of our modern societies, but in the near future our aging electrical infrastructure will not be able to keep pace with our demands. As a result, nations worldwide have started to convert their power grids into smart grids that will have improved communication and control systems. A smart grid will be better able to incorporate new forms of energy generation as well as be self-healing and more reliable. This paper investigates a threat to wireless communication networks from a fully realized quantum computer, and provides a means to avoid this problem in smart grid domains. We discuss and compare the security aspects, the complexities and the performance of authentication using public-key cryptography and using Merkel trees. As a result, we argue for the use of Merkle trees as opposed to public key encryption for authentication of devices in wireless mesh networks (WMN) used in smart grid applications.

A Contemplator on Topical Image Encryption Measures

Images unduly assist digital communication in this aeon of multimedia. During times a person transmits confidential images over a flabby communication network, sheer protection is an accost contention to preserve the privacy of images. Encryption is one of the practice to clutch the reticence of images. Image encryption contributes a preeminent bite to charter security for secure sight data communication over the internet. Our work illustrates a survey on image encryption in different domains providing concise exordium to cryptography, moreover, furnishing the review of sundry image encryption techniques.

Reversible Watermarking in Medical Image Using RDWT and Sub-Sample

This paper proposed a reversible medical image watermarking scheme using Redundant Discrete Wavelet Transform (RDWT) and sub-sample. To meet the highly demand of the perceptional quality, the proposed scheme embedding the watermark by modifying the RDWT coefficients. The sub-sample scheme is introduced to the proposed scheme for the enhancement of the embedding capacity. Moreover, to meet the need of security, a PWLCM based image encryption algorithm is introduced for encrypting the image after the watermark embedding. The experimental results suggests that the proposed scheme not only meet the highly demand of the perceptional quality, but also have better embedding capacity than former DWT based scheme. Also the encryption scheme could protect the image contents efficiently.

Towards Parameterized Shared Key for AVK Approach

“Key” plays a vital role in every symmetric key cryptosystem. The obvious way of enhancing security of any cryptosystem is to keep the key as large as possible. But it may not be suitable for low power devices since higher computation will be done for longer keys and that will increase the power requirement which decreases the device's performance. In order to resolve the former specified problem an alternative approach can be used in which the length of key is fixed and its value varies in every session. This is Time Variant Key approach or Automatic Variable Key (AVK) approach. The Security of AVK based cryptosystem is enhanced by exchanging some parameters instead of keys between the communicating parties, then these parameters will be used to generate required keys at the receiver end. This chapter presents implementation of the above specified Mechanism. A model has been demonstrated with parameterized scheme and issues in AVK approach. Further, it has been analyzed from different users' perspectives. This chapter also highlights the benefits of AVK model to ensure two levels of security with characterization of methods for AVK and Estimation of key computation based on parameters only. The characteristic components of recent styles of key design with consideration of key size, life time of key and breaking threshold has also been pointed out. These characteristics are essential in the design of efficient symmetric key cryptosystem. The novel approach of AVK based cryptosystem is suitable for low power devices and useful for exchanging very large objects or files. This scheme has been demonstrated with Fibonacci-Q matrix and sparse matrix based diffused key information exchange procedures. These models have been further tested from perspective of hackers and cryptanalyst, to exploit any weakness with fixed size dynamic keys.

A Novel Pixel Merging-Based Lossless Recovery Algorithm for Basic Matrix VSS

Lossless recovery in visual secret share (VSS) is very meaningful. In this paper, a novel lossless recovery algorithm for the basic matrix VSS is proposed. The secret image is reconstructed losslessly by using simple exclusive XOR operation and merging pixel. The algorithm not only can apply to the VSS without pixel expansion but also can apply to VSS with pixel expansion. The condition of lossless recovery of a VSS is given by analyzing the XOR all columns of basic matrixes. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed scheme.

Realization of a New Robust and Secure Watermarking Technique Using DC Coefficient Modification in Pixel Domain and Chaotic Encryption

The proliferation of information and communication technology has made exchange of information easier than ever. Security, Duplication and manipulation of information in such a scenario has become a major challenge to the research community round the globe. Digital watermarking has been found to be a potent tool to deal with such issues. A secure and robust image watermarking scheme based on DC coefficient modification in pixel domain and chaotic encryption has been presented in this paper. The cover image has been divided into 8×8 sub-blocks and instead of computing DC coefficient using Discrete Cosine Transform (DCTI, the authors compute DC coefficient of each block in spatial domain. Watermark bits are embedded by modifying DC coefficients of various blocks in spatial domain. The quantum of change to be brought in various pixels of a block for embedding watermark bit depends upon DC coefficient of respective blocks, nature of watermark bit (0 or 1) to be embedded and the adjustment factor. The security of embedded watermark has been taken care of by using chaotic encryption. Experimental investigations show that besides being highly secure the proposed technique is robust to both signal processing and geometric attacks. Further, the proposed scheme is computationally efficient as DC coefficient which holds the watermark information has been computed in pixel domain instead of using DCT on an image block.