Data Hiding and Its Applications

Data hiding techniques have been widely used to provide copyright protection, data integrity, covert communication, non-repudiation, and authentication, among other applications. In the context of the increased dissemination and distribution of multimedia content over the internet, data hiding methods, such as digital watermarking and steganography, are becoming increasingly relevant in providing multimedia security. The goal of this book is to focus on the improvement of data hiding algorithms and their different applications (both traditional and emerging), bringing together researchers and practitioners from different research fields, including data hiding, signal processing, cryptography, and information theory, among others

CYBERSECURITY FOR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: DEVELOPING PRACTICAL FINGERPRINTING TECHNIQUES FOR INTEGRATED CIRCUITRY

The system on a chip (SoC) paradigm for computing has become more prevalent in modern society. Because of this, reuse of different functional integrated circuits (ICs), with standardized inputs and outputs, make designing SoC systems easier. As a result, the theft of intellectual property for different ICs has become a highly profitable business. One method of theft-prevention is to add a signature, or fingerprint, to ICs so that they may be tracked after they are sold. The contribution of this dissertation is the creation and simulation of three new fingerprinting methods that can be implemented automatically during the design process. In addition, because manufacturing and design costs are significant, three of the fingerprinting methods presented, attempt to alleviate costs by determining the fingerprint in the post-silicon stage of the VLSI design cycle. Our first two approaches to fingerprint ICs, are to use Observability Don’t Cares (ODCs) and Satisfiability Don’t Cares (SDCs), which are almost always present in ICs, to hide our fingerprint. ODCs cause an IC to ignore certain internal signals, which we can utilize to create fingerprints that have a minimal performance overhead. Using a heuristic approach, we are also able to choose the overhead the gate will have by removing some fingerprint locations. The experiments show that this work is effective and can provide a large number of fingerprints for more substantial circuits, with a minimal overhead. SDCs are similar to ODCs except that they focus on input patterns, to gates, that cannot exist. For this work, we found a way to quickly locate most of the SDCs in a circuit and depending on the input patterns that we know will not occur, replace the gates to create a fingerprint with a minimal overhead. We also created two methods to implement this SDC fingerprinting method, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Both the ODC and SDC fingerprinting methods can be implemented in the circuit design or physical design of the IC, and finalized in the post-silicon phase, thus reducing the cost of manufacturing several different circuits. The third method developed for this dissertation was based on our previous work on finite state machine (FSM) protection to generate a fingerprint. We show that we can edit ICs with incomplete FSMs by adding additional transitions from the set of don’t care transitions. Although the best candidates for this method are those with unused states and transitions, additional states can be added to the circuit to generate additional don’t care transitions and states, useful for generating more fingerprints. This method has the potential for an astronomical number of fingerprints, but the generated fingerprints need to be filtered for designs that have an acceptable design overhead in comparison to the original circuit. Our fourth and final method for IC fingerprinting utilizes scan-chains which help to monitor the internal state of a sequential circuit. By modifying the interconnects between flip flops in a scan chain we can create unique fingerprints that are easy to detect by the user. These modifications are done after the design for test and during the fabrication stage, which helps reduce redesign overhead. These changes can also be finalized in the post-silicon stage, similar to the work for the ODC and SDC fingerprinting, to minimize manufacturing costs. The hope with this dissertation is to demonstrate that these methods for generating fingerprints, for ICs, will improve upon the current state of the art. First, these methods will create a significant number of unique fingerprints. Second, they will create fingerprints that have an acceptable overhead and are easy to detect by the developer and are harder to detect or remove by the adversary. Finally, we show that three of the methods will reduce the cost of manufacturing by being able to be implemented in the later stages of their design cycle

Symmetry-Adapted Machine Learning for Information Security

Symmetry-adapted machine learning has shown encouraging ability to mitigate the security risks in information and communication technology (ICT) systems. It is a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) that relies on the principles of processing future events by learning past events or historical data. The autonomous nature of symmetry-adapted machine learning supports effective data processing and analysis for security detection in ICT systems without the interference of human authorities. Many industries are developing machine-learning-adapted solutions to support security for smart hardware, distributed computing, and the cloud. In our Special Issue book, we focus on the deployment of symmetry-adapted machine learning for information security in various application areas. This security approach can support effective methods to handle the dynamic nature of security attacks by extraction and analysis of data to identify hidden patterns of data. The main topics of this Issue include malware classification, an intrusion detection system, image watermarking, color image watermarking, battlefield target aggregation behavior recognition model, IP camera, Internet of Things (IoT) security, service function chain, indoor positioning system, and crypto-analysis

Scalable Wavelet-Based Active Network Stepping Stone Detection

Network intrusions leverage vulnerable hosts as stepping stones to penetrate deeper into a network and mask malicious actions from detection. This research focuses on a novel active watermark technique using Discrete Wavelet Transformations to mark and detect interactive network sessions. This technique is scalable, nearly invisible and resilient to multi-flow attacks. The watermark is simulated using extracted timestamps from the CAIDA 2009 dataset and replicated in a live environment. The simulation results demonstrate that the technique accurately detects the presence of a watermark at a 5% False Positive and False Negative rate for both the extracted timestamps as well as the empirical tcplib distribution. The watermark extraction accuracy is approximately 92%. The live experiment is implemented using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. The client system sends marked and unmarked packets from California to Virginia using stepping stones in Tokyo, Ireland and Oregon. Five trials are conducted using simultaneous watermarked and unmarked samples. The live results are similar to the simulation and provide evidence demonstrating the effectiveness in a live environment to identify stepping stones

Multibiometric security in wireless communication systems

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University, 05/08/2010.This thesis has aimed to explore an application of Multibiometrics to secured wireless communications. The medium of study for this purpose included Wi-Fi, 3G, and WiMAX, over which simulations and experimental studies were carried out to assess the performance. In specific, restriction of access to authorized users only is provided by a technique referred to hereafter as multibiometric cryptosystem. In brief, the system is built upon a complete challenge/response methodology in order to obtain a high level of security on the basis of user identification by fingerprint and further confirmation by verification of the user through text-dependent speaker recognition. First is the enrolment phase by which the database of watermarked fingerprints with memorable texts along with the voice features, based on the same texts, is created by sending them to the server through wireless channel. Later is the verification stage at which claimed users, ones who claim are genuine, are verified against the database, and it consists of five steps. Initially faced by the identification level, one is asked to first present one’s fingerprint and a memorable word, former is watermarked into latter, in order for system to authenticate the fingerprint and verify the validity of it by retrieving the challenge for accepted user. The following three steps then involve speaker recognition including the user responding to the challenge by text-dependent voice, server authenticating the response, and finally server accepting/rejecting the user. In order to implement fingerprint watermarking, i.e. incorporating the memorable word as a watermark message into the fingerprint image, an algorithm of five steps has been developed. The first three novel steps having to do with the fingerprint image enhancement (CLAHE with 'Clip Limit', standard deviation analysis and sliding neighborhood) have been followed with further two steps for embedding, and extracting the watermark into the enhanced fingerprint image utilising Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). In the speaker recognition stage, the limitations of this technique in wireless communication have been addressed by sending voice feature (cepstral coefficients) instead of raw sample. This scheme is to reap the advantages of reducing the transmission time and dependency of the data on communication channel, together with no loss of packet. Finally, the obtained results have verified the claims

Recent Advances in Steganography

Steganography is the art and science of communicating which hides the existence of the communication. Steganographic technologies are an important part of the future of Internet security and privacy on open systems such as the Internet. This book's focus is on a relatively new field of study in Steganography and it takes a look at this technology by introducing the readers various concepts of Steganography and Steganalysis. The book has a brief history of steganography and it surveys steganalysis methods considering their modeling techniques. Some new steganography techniques for hiding secret data in images are presented. Furthermore, steganography in speeches is reviewed, and a new approach for hiding data in speeches is introduced

Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2011, nr 4

kwartalni

Novel Computational Methods for Integrated Circuit Reverse Engineering

Production of Integrated Circuits (ICs) has been largely strengthened by globalization. System-on-chip providers are capable of utilizing many different providers which can be responsible for a single task. This horizontal structure drastically improves to time-to-market and reduces manufacturing cost. However, untrust of oversea foundries threatens to dismantle the complex economic model currently in place. Many Intellectual Property (IP) consumers become concerned over what potentially malicious or unspecified logic might reside within their application. This logic which is inserted with the intention of causing harm to a consumer has been referred to as a Hardware Trojan (HT). To help IP consumers, researchers have looked into methods for finding HTs. Such methods tend to rely on high-level information relating to the circuit, which might not be accessible. There is a high possibility that IP is delivered in the gate or layout level. Some services and image processing methods can be leveraged to convert layout level information to gate-level, but such formats are incompatible with detection schemes that require hardware description language. By leveraging standard graph and dynamic programming algorithms a set of tools is developed that can help bridge the gap between gate-level netlist access and HT detection. To help in this endeavor this dissertation focuses on several problems associated with reverse engineering ICs. Logic signal identification is used to find malicious signals, and logic desynthesis is used to extract high level details. Each of the proposed method have their results analyzed for accuracy and runtime. It is found that method for finding logic tends to be the most difficult task, in part due to the degree of heuristic\u27s inaccuracy. With minor improvements moderate sized ICs could have their high-level function recovered within minutes, which would allow for a trained eye or automated methods to more easily detect discrepancies within a circuit\u27s design

Multimedia

The nowadays ubiquitous and effortless digital data capture and processing capabilities offered by the majority of devices, lead to an unprecedented penetration of multimedia content in our everyday life. To make the most of this phenomenon, the rapidly increasing volume and usage of digitised content requires constant re-evaluation and adaptation of multimedia methodologies, in order to meet the relentless change of requirements from both the user and system perspectives. Advances in Multimedia provides readers with an overview of the ever-growing field of multimedia by bringing together various research studies and surveys from different subfields that point out such important aspects. Some of the main topics that this book deals with include: multimedia management in peer-to-peer structures & wireless networks, security characteristics in multimedia, semantic gap bridging for multimedia content and novel multimedia applications

Data Exfiltration:A Review of External Attack Vectors and Countermeasures

AbstractContext One of the main targets of cyber-attacks is data exfiltration, which is the leakage of sensitive or private data to an unauthorized entity. Data exfiltration can be perpetrated by an outsider or an insider of an organization. Given the increasing number of data exfiltration incidents, a large number of data exfiltration countermeasures have been developed. These countermeasures aim to detect, prevent, or investigate exfiltration of sensitive or private data. With the growing interest in data exfiltration, it is important to review data exfiltration attack vectors and countermeasures to support future research in this field. Objective This paper is aimed at identifying and critically analysing data exfiltration attack vectors and countermeasures for reporting the status of the art and determining gaps for future research. Method We have followed a structured process for selecting 108 papers from seven publication databases. Thematic analysis method has been applied to analyse the extracted data from the reviewed papers. Results We have developed a classification of (1) data exfiltration attack vectors used by external attackers and (2) the countermeasures in the face of external attacks. We have mapped the countermeasures to attack vectors. Furthermore, we have explored the applicability of various countermeasures for different states of data (i.e., in use, in transit, or at rest). Conclusion This review has revealed that (a) most of the state of the art is focussed on preventive and detective countermeasures and significant research is required on developing investigative countermeasures that are equally important; (b) Several data exfiltration countermeasures are not able to respond in real-time, which specifies that research efforts need to be invested to enable them to respond in real-time (c) A number of data exfiltration countermeasures do not take privacy and ethical concerns into consideration, which may become an obstacle in their full adoption (d) Existing research is primarily focussed on protecting data in ‘in use’ state, therefore, future research needs to be directed towards securing data in ‘in rest’ and ‘in transit’ states (e) There is no standard or framework for evaluation of data exfiltration countermeasures. We assert the need for developing such an evaluation framework