Watermarking for the Secure Transmission of the Key into an Encrypted Image

Ensuring the confidentiality of any data exchanged always presents a great concern for all communication instances. Technically, encryption is the ideal solution for this task. However, this process must deal with the progress of the cryptanalysis that aims to disclose the information exchanged. The risk increases due to the need for a dual transmission that includes the encrypted medium and the decryption key. In a context of chaotic encryption of images, we propose to insert the decryption key into the encrypted image using image watermarking. Thus, only the watermarked encrypted image will be transmitted. Upon reception, the recipient extracts the key and decrypts the image. The cryptosystem proposed is based on an encryption using a dynamic Look-Up Table issued from a chaotic generator. The obtained results prove the efficiency of our method to ensure a secure exchange of images and keys

Cryptography and Its Applications in Information Security

Nowadays, mankind is living in a cyber world. Modern technologies involve fast communication links between potentially billions of devices through complex networks (satellite, mobile phone, Internet, Internet of Things (IoT), etc.). The main concern posed by these entangled complex networks is their protection against passive and active attacks that could compromise public security (sabotage, espionage, cyber-terrorism) and privacy. This Special Issue “Cryptography and Its Applications in Information Security” addresses the range of problems related to the security of information in networks and multimedia communications and to bring together researchers, practitioners, and industrials interested by such questions. It consists of eight peer-reviewed papers, however easily understandable, that cover a range of subjects and applications related security of information

Research on digital image watermark encryption based on hyperchaos

The digital watermarking technique embeds meaningful information into one or more watermark images hidden in one image, in which it is known as a secret carrier. It is difficult for a hacker to extract or remove any hidden watermark from an image, and especially to crack so called digital watermark. The combination of digital watermarking technique and traditional image encryption technique is able to greatly improve anti-hacking capability, which suggests it is a good method for keeping the integrity of the original image. The research works contained in this thesis include: (1)A literature review the hyperchaotic watermarking technique is relatively more advantageous, and becomes the main subject in this programme. (2)The theoretical foundation of watermarking technologies, including the human visual system (HVS), the colour space transform, discrete wavelet transform (DWT), the main watermark embedding algorithms, and the mainstream methods for improving watermark robustness and for evaluating watermark embedding performance. (3) The devised hyperchaotic scrambling technique it has been applied to colour image watermark that helps to improve the image encryption and anti-cracking capabilities. The experiments in this research prove the robustness and some other advantages of the invented technique. This thesis focuses on combining the chaotic scrambling and wavelet watermark embedding to achieve a hyperchaotic digital watermark to encrypt digital products, with the human visual system (HVS) and other factors taken into account. This research is of significant importance and has industrial application value

Entropy in Image Analysis II

Image analysis is a fundamental task for any application where extracting information from images is required. The analysis requires highly sophisticated numerical and analytical methods, particularly for those applications in medicine, security, and other fields where the results of the processing consist of data of vital importance. This fact is evident from all the articles composing the Special Issue "Entropy in Image Analysis II", in which the authors used widely tested methods to verify their results. In the process of reading the present volume, the reader will appreciate the richness of their methods and applications, in particular for medical imaging and image security, and a remarkable cross-fertilization among the proposed research areas

Dynamical Systems

Complex systems are pervasive in many areas of science integrated in our daily lives. Examples include financial markets, highway transportation networks, telecommunication networks, world and country economies, social networks, immunological systems, living organisms, computational systems and electrical and mechanical structures. Complex systems are often composed of a large number of interconnected and interacting entities, exhibiting much richer global scale dynamics than the properties and behavior of individual entities. Complex systems are studied in many areas of natural sciences, social sciences, engineering and mathematical sciences. This special issue therefore intends to contribute towards the dissemination of the multifaceted concepts in accepted use by the scientific community. We hope readers enjoy this pertinent selection of papers which represents relevant examples of the state of the art in present day research. [...

Applied Metaheuristic Computing

For decades, Applied Metaheuristic Computing (AMC) has been a prevailing optimization technique for tackling perplexing engineering and business problems, such as scheduling, routing, ordering, bin packing, assignment, facility layout planning, among others. This is partly because the classic exact methods are constrained with prior assumptions, and partly due to the heuristics being problem-dependent and lacking generalization. AMC, on the contrary, guides the course of low-level heuristics to search beyond the local optimality, which impairs the capability of traditional computation methods. This topic series has collected quality papers proposing cutting-edge methodology and innovative applications which drive the advances of AMC

Crowdfunding Non-fungible Tokens on the Blockchain

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been used as a way of rewarding content creators. Artists publish their works on the blockchain as NFTs, which they can then sell. The buyer of an NFT then holds ownership of a unique digital asset, which can be resold in much the same way that real-world art collectors might trade paintings. However, while a deal of effort has been spent on selling works of art on the blockchain, very little attention has been paid to using the blockchain as a means of fundraising to help finance the artist’s work in the first place. Additionally, while blockchains like Ethereum are ideal for smaller works of art, additional support is needed when the artwork is larger than is feasible to store on the blockchain. In this paper, we propose a fundraising mechanism that will help artists to gain financial support for their initiatives, and where the backers can receive a share of the profits in exchange for their support. We discuss our prototype implementation using the SpartanGold framework. We then discuss how this system could be expanded to support large NFTs with the 0Chain blockchain, and describe how we could provide support for ongoing storage of these NFTs

Fake Malware Generation Using HMM and GAN

In the past decade, the number of malware attacks have grown considerably and, more importantly, evolved. Many researchers have successfully integrated state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to combat this ever present and rising threat to information security. However, the lack of enough data to appropriately train these machine learning models is one big challenge that is still present. Generative modelling has proven to be very efficient at generating image-like synthesized data that can match the actual data distribution. In this paper, we aim to generate malware samples as opcode sequences and attempt to differentiate them from the real ones with the goal to build fake malware data that can be used to effectively train the machine learning models. We use and compare different Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) algorithms and Hidden Markov Models (HMM) to generate such fake samples obtaining promising results

Persistent mutual information

We study Persistent Mutual Information (PMI), the information about the past that persists into the future as a function of the length of an intervening time interval. Particularly relevant is the limit of an infinite intervening interval, which we call Permanently Persistent MI. In the logistic and tent maps PPMI is found to be the logarithm of the global periodicity for both the cases of periodic attractor and multi-band chaos. This leads us to suggest that PPMI can be a good candidate for a measure of strong emergence, by which we mean behaviour that can be forecast only by examining a specific realisation. We develop the phenomenology to interpret PMI in systems where it increases indefinitely with resolution. Among those are area-preserving maps. The scaling factor r for how PMI grows with resolution can be written in terms of the combination of information dimensions of the underlying spaces. We identify r with the extent of causality recoverable at a certain resolution, and compute it numerically for the standard map, where it is found to reflect a variety of map features, such as the number of degrees of freedom, the scaling related to existence of different types of trajectories, or even the apparent peak which we conjecture to be a direct consequence of the stickiness phenomenon. We show that in general only a certain degree of mixing between regular and chaotic orbits can result in the observed values of r. Using the same techniques we also develop a method to compute PMI through local sampling of the joint distribution of past and future. Preliminary results indicate that PMI of the Double Pendulum shows some similar features, and that in area-preserving dynamical systems there might be regimes where the joint distribution is multifractal