Perfectly secure steganography: hiding information in the quantum noise of a photograph

We show that the quantum nature of light can be used to hide a secret message within a photograph. Using this physical principle we achieve information-theoretic secure steganography, which had remained elusive until now. The protocol is such that the digital picture in which the secret message is embedded is perfectly undistinguishable from an ordinary photograph. This implies that, on a fundamental level, it is impossible to discriminate a private communication from an exchange of photographs.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures + appendix : 5 pages, 6 figure

Robust image steganography against lossy JPEG compression based on embedding domain selection and adaptive error correction

Transmitting images for communication on social networks has become routine, which is helpful for covert communication. The traditional steganography algorithm is unable to successfully convey secret information since the social network channel will perform lossy operations on images, such as JPEG compression. Previous studies tried to solve this problem by enhancing the robustness or making the cover adapt to the channel processing. In this study, we proposed a robust image steganography method against lossy JPEG compression based on embedding domain selection and adaptive error correction. To improve anti-steganalysis performance, the embedding domain is selected adaptively. To increase robustness and lessen the impact on anti-steganalysis performance, the error correction capacity of the error correction code is adaptively adjusted to eliminate redundancy. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better anti-steganalysis and robustness

Secure digital documents using Steganography and QR Code

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University LondonWith the increasing use of the Internet several problems have arisen regarding the processing of electronic documents. These include content filtering, content retrieval/search. Moreover, document security has taken a centre stage including copyright protection, broadcast monitoring etc. There is an acute need of an effective tool which can find the identity, location and the time when the document was created so that it can be determined whether or not the contents of the document were tampered with after creation. Owing the sensitivity of the large amounts of data which is processed on a daily basis, verifying the authenticity and integrity of a document is more important now than it ever was. Unsurprisingly document authenticity verification has become the centre of attention in the world of research. Consequently, this research is concerned with creating a tool which deals with the above problem. This research proposes the use of a Quick Response Code as a message carrier for Text Key-print. The Text Key-print is a novel method which employs the basic element of the language (i.e. Characters of the alphabet) in order to achieve authenticity of electronic documents through the transformation of its physical structure into a logical structured relationship. The resultant dimensional matrix is then converted into a binary stream and encapsulated with a serial number or URL inside a Quick response Code (QR code) to form a digital fingerprint mark. For hiding a QR code, two image steganography techniques were developed based upon the spatial and the transform domains. In the spatial domain, three methods were proposed and implemented based on the least significant bit insertion technique and the use of pseudorandom number generator to scatter the message into a set of arbitrary pixels. These methods utilise the three colour channels in the images based on the RGB model based in order to embed one, two or three bits per the eight bit channel which results in three different hiding capacities. The second technique is an adaptive approach in transforming domain where a threshold value is calculated under a predefined location for embedding in order to identify the embedding strength of the embedding technique. The quality of the generated stego images was evaluated using both objective (PSNR) and Subjective (DSCQS) methods to ensure the reliability of our proposed methods. The experimental results revealed that PSNR is not a strong indicator of the perceived stego image quality, but not a bad interpreter also of the actual quality of stego images. Since the visual difference between the cover and the stego image must be absolutely imperceptible to the human visual system, it was logically convenient to ask human observers with different qualifications and experience in the field of image processing to evaluate the perceived quality of the cover and the stego image. Thus, the subjective responses were analysed using statistical measurements to describe the distribution of the scores given by the assessors. Thus, the proposed scheme presents an alternative approach to protect digital documents rather than the traditional techniques of digital signature and watermarking

Design and simulation a video steganography system by using FFT­turbo code methods for copyrights application

Protecting information on various communication media is considered an essential requirement in the present information transmission technology. So, there is a continuous search around different modern techniques that may be used to protect the data from the attackers. Steganography is one of those techniques that can be used to maintain the copyright by employing it to cover the publisher logo image inside the video frames. Nowadays, most of the popular known of the Video-Steganography methods become a conventional technique to the attacker, so there is a requirement for a modern and smart strategy to protect the copyright of the digital video file. Where this proposed system goal to create a hybrid system that combines the properties of Cryptography and Steganography work to protect the copyright hidden data from different attack types with maintaining of characteristics of the original video (quality and resolution). In this article, a modern Video-Steganography method is presented by employing the benefits of TC (Turbo code) to encrypt the pixels of logo image and Least two Significant Bit Technique procedure to embed the encryption pixels inside the frames of the video file. The insertion is performed in the frequency domain by applying the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)on the video frames. The examination of the suggested architecture is done by terms of Structural Similarity Index, MSE (mean squared error), and PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio) by comparing between an original and extracted logo as well as between original and Steganographic video (averaged overall digital frames in the video). The simulation results show that this method proved high security, robustness, capacity and produces a substantial performance enhancement over the present known ways with fewer distortions in the quality of the vide

Design and simulation a video steganography system by using FFT­turbo code methods for copyrights application

Protecting information on various communication media is considered an essential requirement in the present information transmission technology. So, there is a continuous search around different modern techniques that may be used to protect the data from the attackers. Steganography is one of those techniques that can be used to maintain the copyright by employing it to cover the publisher logo image inside the video frames. Nowadays, most of the popular known of the Video-Steganography methods become a conventional technique to the attacker, so there is a requirement for a modern and smart strategy to protect the copyright of the digital video file. Where this proposed system goal to create a hybrid system that combines the properties of Cryptography and Steganography work to protect the copyright hidden data from different attack types with maintaining of characteristics of the original video (quality and resolution). In this article, a modern Video-Steganography method is presented by employing the benefits of TC (Turbo code) to encrypt the pixels of logo image and Least two Significant Bit Technique procedure to embed the encryption pixels inside the frames of the video file. The insertion is performed in the frequency domain by applying the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)on the video frames. The examination of the suggested architecture is done by terms of Structural Similarity Index, MSE (mean squared error), and PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio) by comparing between an original and extracted logo as well as between original and Steganographic video (averaged overall digital frames in the video). The simulation results show that this method proved high security, robustness, capacity and produces a substantial performance enhancement over the present known ways with fewer distortions in the quality of the vide

Efficient QR code authentication mechanism based on Sudoku

Abstract(#br)QR code is an important means for delivering information which has been widely used in our daily life. As an ISO international standard, the QR code encoding and decoding process are disclosed publicly, thus it is easy to decode a QR code then forge a new QR code with the same QR code public message. It can lead to the problems of information forgery and ease the spreading of fake news. To overcome this weakness, we propose a simple and efficient QR code authentication mechanism to embed the authentication information in the padding region of QR code based on the characteristics of Sudoku and Reed-Solomon code. Different from the previous scheme, the proposed scheme embeds the authentication information without consuming the QR code error correction capacity and is able to..

Preserving privacy in edge computing

Edge computing or fog computing enables realtime services to smart application users by storing data and services at the edge of the networks. Edge devices in the edge computing handle data storage and service provisioning. Therefore, edge computing has become a  new norm for several delay-sensitive smart applications such as automated vehicles, ambient-assisted living, emergency response services, precision agriculture, and smart electricity grids. Despite having great potential, privacy threats are the main barriers to the success of edge computing. Attackers can leak private or sensitive information of data owners and modify service-related data for hampering service provisioning in edge computing-based smart applications. This research takes privacy issues of heterogeneous smart application data into account that are stored in edge data centers. From there, this study focuses on the development of privacy-preserving models for user-generated smart application data in edge computing and edge service-related data, such as Quality-of-Service (QoS) data, for ensuring unbiased service provisioning. We begin with developing privacy-preserving techniques for user data generated by smart applications using steganography that is one of the data hiding techniques. In steganography, user sensitive information is hidden within nonsensitive information of data before outsourcing smart application data, and stego data are produced for storing in the edge data center. A steganography approach must be reversible or lossless to be useful in privacy-preserving techniques. In this research, we focus on numerical (sensor data) and textual (DNA sequence and text) data steganography. Existing steganography approaches for numerical data are irreversible. Hence, we introduce a lossless or reversible numerical data steganography approach using Error Correcting Codes (ECC). Modern lossless steganography approaches for text data steganography are mainly application-specific and lacks imperceptibility, and DNA steganography requires reference DNA sequence for the reconstruction of the original DNA sequence. Therefore, we present the first blind and lossless DNA sequence steganography approach based on the nucleotide substitution method in this study. In addition, a text steganography method is proposed that using invisible character and compression based encoding for ensuring reversibility and higher imperceptibility.  Different experiments are conducted to demonstrate the justification of our proposed methods in these studies. The searching capability of the stored stego data is challenged in the edge data center without disclosing sensitive information. We present a privacy-preserving search framework for stego data on the edge data center that includes two methods. In the first method, we present a keyword-based privacy-preserving search method that allows a user to send a search query as a hash string. However, this method does not support the range query. Therefore, we develop a range search method on stego data using an order-preserving encryption (OPE) scheme. In both cases, the search service provider retrieves corresponding stego data without revealing any sensitive information. Several experiments are conducted for evaluating the performance of the framework. Finally, we present a privacy-preserving service computation framework using Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) based cryptosystem for ensuring the service provider's privacy during service selection and composition. Our contributions are two folds. First, we introduce a privacy-preserving service selection model based on encrypted Quality-of-Service (QoS) values of edge services for ensuring privacy. QoS values are encrypted using FHE. A distributed computation model for service selection using MapReduce is designed for improving efficiency. Second, we develop a composition model for edge services based on the functional relationship among edge services for optimizing the service selection process. Various experiments are performed in both centralized and distributed computing environments to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework using a synthetic QoS dataset