On Real-valued Visual Cryptographic Basis Matrices

Visual cryptography (VC) encodes an image into noise-like shares, which can be stacked to reveal a reduced quality version of the original. The problem with encrypting colour images is that they must undergo heavy pre-processing to reduce them to binary, entailing significant quality loss. This paper proposes VC that works directly on intermediate grayscale values per colour channel and demonstrates real-valued basis matrices for this purpose. The resulting stacked shares produce a clearer reconstruction than in binary VC, and to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is the first method posing no restrictions on colour values while maintaining the ability to decrypt with human vision. Grayscale and colour images of differing entropies are encrypted using fuzzy OR and XOR, and their PSNR and structural similarities are compared with binary VC to demonstrate improved quality. It is compared with previous research and its advantages highlighted, notably in high quality reconstructions with minimal processing

TrusNet: Peer-to-Peer Cryptographic Authentication

Originally, the Internet was meant as a general purpose communication protocol, transferring primarily text documents between interested parties. Over time, documents expanded to include pictures, videos and even web pages. Increasingly, the Internet is being used to transfer a new kind of data which it was never designed for. In most ways, this new data type fits in naturally to the Internet, taking advantage of the near limit-less expanse of the protocol. Hardware protocols, unlike previous data types, provide a unique set security problem. Much like financial data, hardware protocols extended across the Internet must be protected with authentication. Currently, systems which do authenticate do so through a central server, utilizing a similar authentication model to the HTTPS protocol. This hierarchical model is often at odds with the needs of hardware protocols, particularly in ad-hoc networks where peer-to-peer communication is prioritized over a hierarchical model. Our project attempts to implement a peer-to-peer cryptographic authentication protocol to be used to protect hardware protocols extending over the Internet. The TrusNet project uses public-key cryptography to authenticate nodes on a distributed network, with each node locally managing a record of the public keys of nodes which it has encountered. These keys are used to secure data transmission between nodes and to authenticate the identities of nodes. TrusNet is designed to be used on multiple different types of network interfaces, but currently only has explicit hooks for Internet Protocol connections. As of June 2016, TrusNet has successfully achieved a basic authentication and communication protocol on Windows 7, OSX, Linux 14 and the Intel Edison. TrusNet uses RC-4 as its stream cipher and RSA as its public-key algorithm, although both of these are easily configurable. Along with the library, TrusNet also enables the building of a unit testing suite, a simple UI application designed to visualize the basics of the system and a build with hooks into the I/O pins of the Intel Edison allowing for a basic demonstration of the system

Improved method for image security based on chaotic-shuffle and chaotic-diffusion algorithms

In this paper, we propose to enhance the security performance of the color image encryption algorithm which depends on multi-chaotic systems. The current cryptosystem utilized a pixel-chaotic-shuffle system to encode images, in which the time of shuffling is autonomous to the plain-image. Thus, it neglects to the picked plaintext and known-plaintext attacks. Also, the statistical features of the cryptosystem are not up to the standard. Along these lines, the security changes are encircled to make the above attacks infeasible and upgrade the statistical features also. It is accomplished by altering the pixel-chaotic-shuffle component and including another pixel-chaotic-diffusion system to it. The keys for diffusion of pixels are extracted from the same chaotic arrangements created in the past stage. The renovation investigations and studies are performed to exhibit that the refreshed version of cryptosystem has better statistical features and invulnerable to the picked plaintext and known plaintext attacks than the current algorithm

Roadmap on optical security

Postprint (author's final draft

Computational Analysis of Interleaving PN-Sequences with Different Polynomials

Binary PN-sequences generated by LFSRs exhibit good statistical properties; however, due to their intrinsic linearity, they are not suitable for cryptographic applications. In order to break such a linearity, several approaches can be implemented. For example, one can interleave several PN-sequences to increase the linear complexity. In this work, we present a deep randomness study of the resultant sequences of interleaving binary PN-sequences coming from different characteristic polynomials with the same degree. We analyze the period and the linear complexity, as well as many other important cryptographic properties of such sequences.This work was supported in part by the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI) of the Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN), project P2QProMeTe (PID2020-112586RB-I00/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033). It was also supported by Comunidad de Madrid (Spain) under project CYNAMON (P2018/TCS-4566), co-funded by FSE and European Union FEDER funds. The work of the second author was partially supported by Spanish grant VIGROB-287 of the University of Alicante