Biblio

To improve efficiency of stegosystem on blockchain and balance the time consumption of Encode and Decode operations, we propose a new blockchain-based steganography scheme, called Keys as Secret Messages (KASM), where a codebook of mappings between bitstrings and public keys can be pre-calculated by both sides with some secret parameters pre-negotiated before covert communication. By applying properties of elliptic curves and pseudorandom number generators, we realize key derivation of codebook item, and we construct the stegosystem with provable security under chosen hiddentext attack. By comparing KASM with Blockchain Covert Channel (BLOCCE) and testing on Bitcoin protocol, we conclude that our proposed stegosystem encodes hiddentexts faster than BLOCCE does and can decode stegotexts in highly acceptable time. The balanced time consumption of Encode and Decode operations of KASM make it applicable in the scene of duplex communication. At the same time, KASM does not leak sender’s private keys, so sender’s digital currencies can be protected.

Internet of Things (IoT) revolutionizes cutting-edge technologies by enabling smart sensing, and actuation of the physical world. IoT enables cooperation between numerous heterogeneous smart devices to exchange and aggregate data from the surrounding environment through the internet. Recently, the range of IoT technology could be utilized in the real world by the rapid spread of sensor devices. These capabilities open the door for vital challenges. Security is the major challenge that faces the IoT networks. Traditional solutions cannot tackle smart and powerful attackers. Moving Target Defense (MTD) deploys mechanisms and strategies that increase attackers' uncertainty and frustrate their attempt to eavesdrop the target to be protected. In addition, Steganography is the practice of concealing a message within another message. For security proposes, Steganography is used to hide significant data within any transmitted messages, such as images, videos, and text files. This paper presents Stegano-MTD framework that enables combination between MTD mechanisms with steganography. This combination offers a lightweight solution that can be implemented on the IoT network. Stegano-MTD slices the message into small labeled chunks and sends them randomly through the network's nodes. Steganography is used for hide the key file that used to reconstruct the original data. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the presented solution.

Security in today's world is one of the most important considerations when one wants to send, receive and store files containing private information or files simply too large for an email attachment. People are becoming more and more dependent on their mobile phones for performing the mentioned critical functionalities. Therefore, it is very important to protect sensitive information when the mobile is lost or stolen. There are many algorithms and methods used to accomplish data security in mobile devices. In general, cryptography and steganography are two common methods used to secure communications. Recently, the field of biology has been combined with the field of cryptography to produce a new field called deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) cryptography which is one of the most powerful tools to solve security problems.This paper proposes a DNA cryptography technique for securing data stored offline in the Android device where users are not aware of the confidentiality of their private data. It is very difficult to predict the one-time pad key that is used as randomly generated and just for one-time. The proposed algorithm uses DNA mapping for dealing with the data as a DNA sequence. Two approaches have been proposed for achieving desired outcomes.

The paper proposes a method for image content recovery based on digital watermarking. Existing image watermarking systems detect the tampering and can identify the exact positions of tampered regions, but only a few systems can recover the original image content. In this paper, we suggest a method for recovering the regions of interest (ROIs). It embeds the semi-fragile watermark resistant to JPEG compression (for the quality parameter values greater than or equal to the predefined threshold) and such local tamperings as splicing, copy-move, and retouching, whereas is destroyed by any other image modifications. In the experimental part, the performance of the method is shown on the road traffic JPEG images where the ROIs correspond to car license plates. The method is proven to be an efficient tool for recovering the original ROIs and can be integrated into any JPEG semi-fragile watermarking system.

IoT is an emerging technology in modern world of communication. As the usage of IoT devices is increasing in day to day life, the secure data communication in IoT environment is the major challenge. Especially, small sized Single-Board Computers (SBCs) or Microcontrollers devices are widely used to transfer data with another in IoT. Due to the less processing power and storage capabilities, the data acquired from these devices must be transferred very securely in order to avoid some ethical issues. There are many cryptography approaches are applied to transfer data between IoT devices, but there are obvious chances to suspect encrypted messages by eavesdroppers. To add more secure data transfer, steganography mechanism is used to avoid the chances of suspicion as another layer of security. Based on the capabilities of IoT devices, low complexity images are used to hide the data with different hiding algorithms. In this research study, the secret data is encoded through QR code and embedded in low complexity cover images by applying image to image hiding fashion. The encoded image is sent to the receiving device via the network. The receiving device extracts the QR code from image using secret key then decoded the original data. The performance measure of the system is evaluated by the image quality parameters mainly Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Normalized Coefficient (NC) and Security with maintaining the quality of contemporary IoT system. Thus, the proposed method hides the precious information within an image using the properties of QR code and sending it without any suspicion to attacker and competes with the existing methods in terms of providing more secure communication between Microcontroller devices in IoT environment.

Video sharing from closed-circuit television video recording or in social media interaction requires self-authentication for responsible and reliable data sharing. Similarly, surveillance video recording is a powerful method of deterring unlawful activities. A Solution-by-Design can be helpful in terms of making a captured video immutable, as such recordings cannot become a piece of evidence until proven to be unaltered. This paper presents a computationally inexpensive method of preserving a chain-of-evidence in surveillance videos using steganography and hashing. The method conforms to the data protection regulations which are increasingly adopted by governments, and is applicable to network edge storage. Security credentials are stored in a hardware wallet independently of the video capture device itself, while evidential information is stored within video frames themselves, independently of the content. The proposed method has turned out to not only preserve the integrity of the stored video data but also results in very limited degradation of the video data due to steganography. Despite the presence of steganographic information, video frames are still available for common image processing tasks such as tracking and classification.

Steganography has made great progress over the past few years due to the advancement of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN), which has caused severe problems in the network security field. Ensuring the accuracy of steganalysis is becoming increasingly difficult. In this paper, we designed a two-channel generative adversarial network (TGAN), inspired by the idea of adversarial training that is based on our previous work. The TGAN consisted of three parts: The first hiding network had two input channels and one output channel. For the second extraction network, the input was a hidden image embedded with the secret image. The third detecting network had two input channels and one output channel. Experimental results on two independent image data sets showed that the proposed TGAN performed well and had better detecting capability compared to other algorithms, thus having important theoretical significance and engineering value.

Steganography is a data hiding technique, which is generally used to hide the data within a file to avoid detection. It is used in the police department, detective investigation, and medical fields as well as in many more fields. Various techniques have been proposed over the years for Image Steganography and also attackers or hackers have developed many decoding tools to break these techniques to retrieve data. In this paper, CAPTCHA codes are used to ensure that the receiver is the intended receiver and not any machine. Here a randomized CAPTCHA code is created to provide additional security to communicate with the authenticated user and used Image Steganography to achieve confidentiality. For achieving secret and reliable communication, encryption and decryption mechanism is performed; hence a machine cannot decode it using any predefined algorithm. Once a secure connection has been established with the intended receiver, the original message is transmitted using the LSB algorithm, which uses the RGB color spectrum to hide the image data ensuring additional encryption.

Video steganography mainly deals with secret data transmission in a carrier video file without being visually noticeable by intruders. Video steganography is preferred over image steganography because a video carries more space in comparison to an image. The main concept of information hiding consists of a cover media, which is a greyscale or a color video, a secret data, which is an image or text, and a stego key. Here a secure video steganography method has been proposed which uses Curvelet Transform for secret data embedding, Elliptic Curve Cryptography for stego key encryption and a threshold algorithm for the determination of the amount of secret data to be encoded per frame. A video is a collection of various frames. The frames are selected randomly from the cover video and the frame number of the respective frames has been indexed in the stego key to find the secret data embedding location. Here, the selection of frames in a sequential manner has been avoided to improve security. For enhanced security, the stego key is also encrypted using Elliptic Curve Integrated Encryption Scheme (ECIES). Fast Discrete Curvelet Transform (FDCT) has been applied to the frames of the cover video and the curvelet coefficients have been modified to obscure the secret data to produce the stego video.

Technology has developed to a very great extent, and the use of smart systems has introduced an increasing threat to data security and privacy. Most of the applications are built-in unsecured operating systems, and so there is a growing threat to information cloning, forging tampering counterfeiting, etc.. This will lead to an un-compensatory loss for end-users particularly in banking applications and personal data in social media. A robust and effective algorithm based on elliptic curve cryptography combined with Hill cipher has been proposed to mitigate such threats and increase information security. In this method, ciphertext and DCT coefficients of an image, embedded into the base image based on LSB watermarking. The ciphertext is generated based on the Hill Cipher algorithm. Hill Cipher can, however, be easily broken and has weak security and to add complexity, Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), is combined with Hill cipher. Based on the ECC algorithm, the key is produced, and this key is employed to generate ciphertext through the Hill cipher algorithm. This combination of both steganography and cryptography results in increased authority and ownership of the data for sub-optimal media applications. It is hard to extract the hidden data and the image without the proper key. The performance for hiding text and image into an image data have been analyzed for sub-optimal multimedia applications.

This paper proposes a steganography method using the digital images. Here, we are embedding the data which is to be secured into the digital image. Human Visual System proved that the changes in the image edges are insensitive to human eyes. Therefore we are using edge detection method in steganography to increase data hiding capacity by embedding more data in these edge pixels. So, if we can increase number of edge pixels, we can increase the amount of data that can be hidden in the image. To increase the number of edge pixels, multiple edge detection is employed. Edge detection is carried out using more sophisticated operator like canny operator. To compensate for the resulting decrease in the PSNR because of increase in the amount of data hidden, Minimum Error Replacement [MER] method is used. Therefore, the main goal of image steganography i.e. security with highest embedding capacity and good visual qualities are achieved. To extract the data we need the original image and the embedding ratio. Extraction is done by taking multiple edges detecting the original image and the data is extracted corresponding to the embedding ratio.

This paper proposes an advanced scheme of message security in 3D cover images using multiple layers of security. Cryptography using AES-256 is implemented in the first layer. In the second layer, edge detection is applied. Finally, LSB steganography is executed in the third layer. The efficiency of the proposed scheme is measured using a number of performance metrics. For instance, mean square error (MSE), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index measure (SSIM), mean absolute error (MAE) and entropy.

Some of the key challenges in steganography are imperceptibility and resistance to detection of steganalysis algorithms. Zero steganography is an approach to data hiding such that the cover image is not modified. This paper focuses on the generation of stego-key, which is an essential component of this steganographic approach. This approach utilizes DNA sequences and shifting and flipping operations in its binary code representation. Experimental results show that the key generation algorithm has a low cracking probability. The algorithm satisfies the avalanche criterion.

Data Transmission in network security is one of the most vital issues in today's communication world. The outcome of the suggested method is outlined over here. Enhanced security can be achieved by this method. The vigorous growth in the field of information communication has made information transmission much easier. But this type of advancement has opened up many possibilities of information being snooped. So, day-by-day maintaining of information security is becoming an inseparable part of computing and communication. In this paper, the authors have explored techniques that blend cryptography & steganography together. In steganography, information is kept hidden behind a cover image. In this paper, approaches for information hiding using both cryptography & steganography is proposed keeping in mind two considerations - size of the encrypted object and degree of security. Here, signature image information is kept hidden into cover image using private key of sender & receiver, which extracts the information from stego image using a public key. This approach can be used for message authentication, message integrity & non-repudiation purpose.

One of the significant advancements in information technology is Cloud computing, but the security issue of data storage is a big problem in the cloud environment. That is why a system is proposed in this paper for improving the security of cloud data using encryption, information concealment, and hashing functions. In the data encryption phase, we implemented hybrid encryption using the algorithm of AES symmetric encryption and the algorithm of RSA asymmetric encryption. Next, the encrypted data will be hidden in an image using LSB algorithm. In the data validation phase, we use the SHA hashing algorithm. Also, in our suggestion, we compress the data using the LZW algorithm before hiding it in the image. Thus, it allows hiding as much data as possible. By using information concealment technology and mixed encryption, we can achieve strong data security. In this paper, PSNR and SSIM values were calculated in addition to the graph to evaluate the image masking performance before and after applying the compression process. The results showed that PSNR values of stego-image are better for compressed data compared to data before compression.

Security of transient fault secured IP cores against piracy, false claim of ownership can be achieved during high level synthesis, especially when handling DSP or multimedia cores. Though watermarking that involves implanting a vendor defined signature onto the design can be useful, however research has shown its limitations such as less designer control, high overhead due to extreme dependency on signature size, combination and encoding rule. This paper proposes an alternative paradigm called `hardware steganography' where hidden additional designer's constraints are implanted in a fault secured IP core using entropy thresholding. In proposed hardware steganography, concealed information in the form of additional edges having a specific entropy value is embedded in the colored interval graph (CIG). This is a signature free approach and ensures high designer control (more robustness and stronger proof of authorship) as well as lower overhead than watermarking schemes used for DSP based IP cores.

It is challenging to detect weak hidden information in a JPEG compressed image. In this paper, we propose a 32-layer convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with feature reuse by concatenating all features from previous layers. The proposed method can improve the flow of gradient and information, and the shared features and bottleneck layers in the proposed CNN model further reduce the number of parameters dramatically. The experimental results shown that the proposed method significantly reduce the detection error rate compared with the existing JPEG steganalysis methods, e.g. state-of-the-art XuNet method and the conventional SCA-GFR method. Compared with XuNet method and conventional method SCA-GFR in detecting J-UNIWARD at 0.1 bpnzAC (bit per non-zero AC DCT coefficient), the proposed method can reduce detection error rate by 4.33% and 6.55% respectively.

In our daily lives, the advances of new technology can be used to sustain the development of people across the globe. Particularly, e-government can be the dynamo of the development for the people. The development of technology and the rapid growth in the use of internet creates a big challenge in the administration in both the public and the private sector. E-government is a vital accomplishment, whereas the security is the main downside which occurs in each e-government process. E-government has to be secure as technology grows and the users have to follow the procedures to make their own transactions safe. This paper tackles the challenges and obstacles to enhance the security of information in e-government. Hence to achieve security data hiding techniques are found to be trustworthy. Reversible data hiding (RDH) is an emerging technique which helps in retaining the quality of the cover image. Hence it is preferred over the traditional data hiding techniques. Modification in the existing algorithm is performed for image encryption scheme and data hiding scheme in order to improve the results. To achieve this secret data is split into 20 parts and data concealing is performed on each part. The data hiding procedure includes embedding of data into least significant nibble of the cover image. The bits are further equally distributed in the cover image to obtain the key security parameters. Hence the obtained results validate that the proposed scheme is better than the existing schemes.

This paper proposes a triple-layer, high capacity, message security scheme. The first two layers are of a cryptographic nature, whereas the third layer is of a steganographic nature. In the first layer, AES-128 encryption is performed on the secret message. In the second layer, a chaotic logistic map encryption is applied on the output of the first secure layer to increase the security of the scheme. In the third layer of security, a 2D image steganography technique is performed, where the least significant bit (LSB) -embedding is done according to a zigzag pattern in each of the three color planes of the cover image (i.e. RGB). The distinguishing feature of the proposed scheme is that the secret data is hidden in a zigzag manner that cannot be predicted by a third party. Moreover, our scheme achieves higher values of peak signal to noise ratio (PPSNR), mean square error (MSE), the structural similarity index metric (SSIM), normal cross correlation (NCC) and image fidelity (IF) compared to its counterparts form the literature. In addition, a histogram analysis as well as the high achieved capacity are magnificent indicators for a reliable and high capacity steganographic scheme.

The presented method of encoding and steganographic embedding of a series of bits for the hidden message was first developed by modifying the digital platform (bases) of the elements of the image container. Unlike other methods, steganographic coding and embedding is accomplished by changing the elements of the image fragment, followed by the formation of code structures for the established structure of the digital representation of the structural elements of the image media image. The method of estimating quantitative indicators of embedded critical data is presented. The number of bits of the container for the developed method of steganographic coding and embedding of critical information is estimated. The efficiency of the presented method is evaluated and the comparative analysis of the value of the embedded digital data in relation to the method of weight coefficients of the discrete cosine transformation matrix, as well as the comparative analysis of the developed method of steganographic coding, compared with the Koch and Zhao methods to determine the embedded data resistance against attacks of various types. It is determined that for different values of the quantization coefficient, the most critical are the built-in containers of critical information, which are built by changing the part of the digital video data platform depending on the size of the digital platform and the number of bits of the built-in container.

Remote authentication via biometric features has received much attention recently, hence the security of biometric data is of great importance. Here a crypto-steganography method applied for the protection of biometric data is implemented. It include semantic segmentation, chaotic encryption, data hiding and fingerprint recognition to avoid the risk of spoofing attacks. Semantically segmented image of the person to be authenticated is used as the cover image and chaotic encrypted fingerprint image is used as secret image here. Chaotic encrypted fingerprint image is embedded into the cover image using Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT). Extracted fingerprint image is then compared with the fingerprints in database to authenticate the person. Qualified Significant Wavelet Trees (QSWT`s) of the cover image act as the target coefficients to insert the secret image. IWT provide both invisibility and resistance against the lossy transmissions. Experimental result shows that the semantic segmentation reduces the bandwidth efficiently. In addition, chaotic encryption and IWT based data hiding increases the security of the transmitted biometric data.

Big data of mobile network privacy is vulnerable to clear text attack in the process of storage and mixed network information sharing, which leads to information leakage. Through the mixed encryption of data of mobile network privacy big data to improve the confidentiality and security of mobile network privacy big data, a mobile network privacy big data hybrid encryption algorithm based on hyperchaos theory is proposed. The hybrid encryption key of mobile network privacy big data is constructed by using hyperchaotic nonlinear mapping hybrid encryption technology. Combined with the feature distribution of mobile network privacy big data, the mixed encrypted public key is designed by using Logistic hyperchaotic arrangement method, and a hyperchaotic analytic cipher and block cipher are constructed by using Rossle chaotic mapping. The random piecewise linear combination method is used to design the coding and key of mobile network privacy big data. According to the two-dimensional coding characteristics of mobile network privacy big data in the key authorization protocol, the hybrid encryption and decryption key of mobile network privacy big data is designed, and the mixed encryption and decryption key of mobile network privacy big data is constructed, Realize the privacy of mobile network big data mixed encryption output and key design. The simulation results show that this method has good confidentiality and strong steganography performance, which improves the anti-attack ability of big data, which is used to encrypt the privacy of mobile network.

Embedding costs used in content-adaptive image steganographic schemes can be defined in a heuristic way or with a statistical model. Inspired by previous steganographic methods, i.e., MG (multivariate Gaussian model) and MiPOD (minimizing the power of optimal detector), we propose a model-driven scheme in this paper. Firstly, we model image residuals obtained by high-pass filtering with quantized multivariate Gaussian distribution. Then, we derive the approximated Fisher Information (FI). We show that FI is related to both Gaussian variance and filter coefficients. Lastly, by selecting the maximum FI value derived with various filters as the final FI, we obtain embedding costs. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is comparable to existing steganographic methods in resisting steganalysis equipped with rich models and selection-channel-aware rich models. It is also computational efficient when compared to MiPOD, which is the state-of-the-art model-driven method.

Technology development has led to rapid increase in demands for multimedia applications. Due to this demand, digital archives are increasingly used to store these multimedia contents. Cloud is the commonly used archive to store, transmit, receive and share multimedia contents. Cloud makes use of internet to perform these tasks due to which data becomes more prone to attacks. Data security and privacy are compromised. This can be avoided by limiting data access to authenticated users and by hiding the data from cloud services that cannot be trusted. Hiding data from the cloud services involves encrypting the data before storing it into the cloud. Data to be shared with other users can be encrypted by utilizing Cipher Text-Policy Attribute Based Encryption (CP-ABE). CP-ABE is used which is a cryptographic technique that controls access to the encrypted data. The pairing-based computation based on bilinearity is used in ABE due to which the requirements for resources like memory and power supply increases rapidly. Most of the devices that we use today have limited memory. Therefore, an efficient pairing free CP- ABE access control scheme using elliptic curve cryptography has been used. Pairing based computation is replaced with scalar product on elliptic curves that reduces the necessary memory and resource requirements for the users. Even though pairing free CP-ABE is used, it is easier to retrieve the plaintext of a secret message if cryptanalysis is used. Therefore, this paper proposes to combine cryptography with steganography in such a way by embedding crypto text into an image to provide increased level of data security and data ownership for sub-optimal multimedia applications. It makes it harder for a cryptanalyst to retrieve the plaintext of a secret message from a stego-object if steganalysis were not used. This scheme significantly improved the data security as well as data privacy.

Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) is one of the spatial domain methods that is more implemented in the data hiding method watermarking. CRT is used to improve security and imperceptibility in the watermarking method. CRT is rarely studied in studies that discuss steganographic images. Steganography research focuses more on increasing imperceptibility, embedded payload, and message security, so methods like LSB are still popular to be developed to date. CRT and LSB have some similarities such as default payload capacity and both are methods in the spatial domain which can produce good imperceptibility quality of stego image. But CRT is very superior in terms of security, so CRT is also widely used in cryptographic algorithms. Some ways to increase imperceptibility in image steganography are edge detection and spread spectrum embedding. This research proposes a combination of edge detection techniques and spread-spectrum embedding based on the CRT method to produce imperceptibility and safe image steganography method. Based on the test results it is proven that the combination of the proposed methods can increase imperceptibility of CRT-based steganography based on SSIM metric.