Using graphic methods to challenge cryptographic performance

Block and stream ciphers have formed the traditional basis for the standardisation of commercial ciphers in the DES, AES, RC4, and so on. More recently alternative graphic methods such as Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) have been adopted for performance gains. In this research we reviewed a range of graphic and non-graphic methods and then designed our own cipher system based on several graphic methods, including Visual Cryptography (VC). We then tested our cipher against RC4 and the AES algorithms for performance and security. The results showed that a graphics based construct may deliver comparable or improved security and performance in many of the required areas. These findings offer potential alternative avenues for post-quantum cryptographic research

Contextualizing Alternative Models of Secret Sharing

A secret sharing scheme is a means of distributing information to a set of players such that any authorized subset of players can recover a secret and any unauthorized subset does not learn any information about the secret. In over forty years of research in secret sharing, there has been an emergence of new models and extended capabilities of secret sharing schemes. In this thesis, we study various models of secret sharing and present them in a consistent manner to provide context for each definition. We discuss extended capabilities of secret sharing schemes, including a comparison of methods for updating secrets via local computations on shares and an analysis of approaches to reproducing/repairing shares. We present an analysis of alternative adversarial settings which have been considered in the area of secret sharing. In this work, we present a formalization of a deniability property which is inherent to some classical secret sharing schemes. We provide new, game-based definitions for different notions of verifiability and robustness. By using consistent terminology and similar game-based definitions, we are able to demystify the subtle differences in each notion raised in the literature

A Study on Visually Encrypted Images for Rights Protection and Authentication

首都大学東京, 2014-03-25, 博士(工学), 甲第444号首都大学東

Authentication of Students and Students’ Work in E-Learning : Report for the Development Bid of Academic Year 2010/11

Global e-learning market is projected to reach $107.3 billion by 2015 according to a new report by The Global Industry Analyst (Analyst 2010). The popularity and growth of the online programmes within the School of Computer Science obviously is in line with this projection. However, also on the rise are students’ dishonesty and cheating in the open and virtual environment of e-learning courses (Shepherd 2008). Institutions offering e-learning programmes are facing the challenges of deterring and detecting these misbehaviours by introducing security mechanisms to the current e-learning platforms. In particular, authenticating that a registered student indeed takes an online assessment, e.g., an exam or a coursework, is essential for the institutions to give the credit to the correct candidate. Authenticating a student is to ensure that a student is indeed who he says he is. Authenticating a student’s work goes one step further to ensure that an authenticated student indeed does the submitted work himself. This report is to investigate and compare current possible techniques and solutions for authenticating distance learning student and/or their work remotely for the elearning programmes. The report also aims to recommend some solutions that fit with UH StudyNet platform.Submitted Versio

Secret Sharing in Visual Cryptography

This thesis examines techniques for recursive hiding scheme for 3 out of 5 secret sharing and a probabilistic 2 out of 3 secret sharing scheme for gray scale images. In recursive hiding of secrets several messages can be hidden in one of the shares of the original secret image. The images that are to be hidden are taken according to their sizes from smaller to the largest. The first small secret image is divided into five different shares using visual cryptography. These shares are placed in the next level to create the shares of larger secret information. The shares at each consecutive level are distributed so that no one has access to all the shares of the smaller images, unless at least three participants come together to reveal the secret information, resulting in 3 out of 5 scheme. In the proposed protocol for gray scale images, the quality of the image is perfect when it is reconstructed for the construction of the final image based on the binary OR operation.Computer Science Departmen

Information Security and Cryptography-Encryption in Journalism

The purpose of this review paper is to garner knowledge about the information security and cryptography encryption practices implementation for journalistic work and its effectiveness in thwarting software security breaches in the wake of ‘Journalism After Snowden’. Systematic literature review for the ‘information security and cryptography encryption in journalism’ employed with an eye to synthesize existing practices in this field. For this, at first the existing approachable research article databases and search engines employed to download or get the abstract of relevant scientific articles which are then used for citation and summarization works in a systematic rigorous anatomization. Contingent upon them their analysis and synthesis employed to arrive at the findings. Research papers collated for the purpose of writing this review paper lighted up the vital issues related to investigative journalists’ safety practices promulgation inadequacies even after the UNESCO 2017 and 2022 guidelines for urgent instrumentalization needs of journalists on the part of its’ member States.Lattice Science Publication (LSP) © Copyright: All rights reserved

High Quality P2P Service Provisioning via Decentralized Trust Management

Trust management is essential to fostering cooperation and high quality service provisioning in several peer-to-peer (P2P) applications. Among those applications are customer-to-customer (C2C) trading sites and markets of services implemented on top of centralized infrastructures, P2P systems, or online social networks. Under these application contexts, existing work does not adequately address the heterogeneity of the problem settings in practice. This heterogeneity includes the different approaches employed by the participants to evaluate trustworthiness of their partners, the diversity in contextual factors that influence service provisioning quality, as well as the variety of possible behavioral patterns of the participants. This thesis presents the design and usage of appropriate computational trust models to enforce cooperation and ensure high quality P2P service provisioning, considering the above heterogeneity issues. In this thesis, first I will propose a graphical probabilistic framework for peers to model and evaluate trustworthiness of the others in a highly heterogeneous setting. The framework targets many important issues in trust research literature: the multi-dimensionality of trust, the reliability of different rating sources, and the personalized modeling and computation of trust in a participant based on the quality of services it provides. Next, an analysis on the effective usage of computational trust models in environments where participants exhibit various behaviors, e.g., honest, rational, and malicious, will be presented. I provide theoretical results showing the conditions under which cooperation emerges when using trust learning models with a given detecting accuracy and how cooperation can still be sustained while reducing the cost and accuracy of those models. As another contribution, I also design and implement a general prototyping and simulation framework for reputation-based trust systems. The developed simulator can be used for many purposes, such as to discover new trust-related phenomena or to evaluate performance of a trust learning algorithm in complex settings. Two potential applications of computational trust models are then discussed: (1) the selection and ranking of (Web) services based on quality ratings from reputable users, and (2) the use of a trust model to choose reliable delegates in a key recovery scenario in a distributed online social network. Finally, I will identify a number of various issues in building next-generation, open reputation-based trust management systems as well as propose several future research directions starting from the work in this thesis

The Proceedings of 14th Australian Information Security Management Conference, 5-6 December 2016, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia

The annual Security Congress, run by the Security Research Institute at Edith Cowan University, includes the Australian Information Security and Management Conference. Now in its fourteenth year, the conference remains popular for its diverse content and mixture of technical research and discussion papers. The area of information security and management continues to be varied, as is reflected by the wide variety of subject matter covered by the papers this year. The conference has drawn interest and papers from within Australia and internationally. All submitted papers were subject to a double blind peer review process. Fifteen papers were submitted from Australia and overseas, of which ten were accepted for final presentation and publication. We wish to thank the reviewers for kindly volunteering their time and expertise in support of this event. We would also like to thank the conference committee who have organised yet another successful congress. Events such as this are impossible without the tireless efforts of such people in reviewing and editing the conference papers, and assisting with the planning, organisation and execution of the conferences. To our sponsors also a vote of thanks for both the financial and moral support provided to the conference. Finally, thank you to the administrative and technical staff, and students of the ECU Security Research Institute for their contributions to the running of the conference