Ubic: Bridging the gap between digital cryptography and the physical world

Advances in computing technology increasingly blur the boundary between the digital domain and the physical world. Although the research community has developed a large number of cryptographic primitives and has demonstrated their usability in all-digital communication, many of them have not yet made their way into the real world due to usability aspects. We aim to make another step towards a tighter integration of digital cryptography into real world interactions. We describe Ubic, a framework that allows users to bridge the gap between digital cryptography and the physical world. Ubic relies on head-mounted displays, like Google Glass, resource-friendly computer vision techniques as well as mathematically sound cryptographic primitives to provide users with better security and privacy guarantees. The framework covers key cryptographic primitives, such as secure identification, document verification using a novel secure physical document format, as well as content hiding. To make a contribution of practical value, we focused on making Ubic as simple, easily deployable, and user friendly as possible.Comment: In ESORICS 2014, volume 8712 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 56-75, Wroclaw, Poland, September 7-11, 2014. Springer, Berlin, German

Fourier-based automatic alignment for improved visual cryptography schemes

International audienceIn Visual Cryptography, several images, called "shadow images", that separately contain no information, are overlapped to reveal a shared secret message. We develop a method to digitally register one printed shadow image acquired by a camera with a purely digital shadow image, stored in memory. Using Fourier techniques derived from Fourier Optics concepts, the idea is to enhance and exploit the quasi periodicity of the shadow images, composed by a random distribution of black and white patterns on a periodic sampling grid. The advantage is to speed up the security control or the access time to the message, in particular in the cases of a small pixel size or of large numbers of pixels. Furthermore, the interest of visual cryptography can be increased by embedding the initial message in two shadow images that do not have identical mathematical supports, making manual registration impractical. Experimental results demonstrate the successful operation of the method, including the possibility to directly project the result onto the printed shadow image

VISUAL CRYPTOGRAPHY FOR COLOR IMAGES

Visual cryptography is a secret sharing scheme for encrypting a secret image, it is a perfectly secure way that allows secret sharing without any cryptographic computation, which is termed as Visual Cryptography Scheme (VCS). In this paper secret image is divided into shares (printed on transparencies), and each share holds some information. At the receiver this shares are merged to obtain the secret information which is revealed without any complex computation. The proposed algorithm is for color host image, divided into three color planes Red, Green, Blue and merged with secret image which is binarized and divided into shares. The decoding requires aligning the result obtained by merging color host image and shares, so as to obtain the secret image

Integration of biometrics and steganography: A comprehensive review

The use of an individual’s biometric characteristics to advance authentication and verification technology beyond the current dependence on passwords has been the subject of extensive research for some time. Since such physical characteristics cannot be hidden from the public eye, the security of digitised biometric data becomes paramount to avoid the risk of substitution or replay attacks. Biometric systems have readily embraced cryptography to encrypt the data extracted from the scanning of anatomical features. Significant amounts of research have also gone into the integration of biometrics with steganography to add a layer to the defence-in-depth security model, and this has the potential to augment both access control parameters and the secure transmission of sensitive biometric data. However, despite these efforts, the amalgamation of biometric and steganographic methods has failed to transition from the research lab into real-world applications. In light of this review of both academic and industry literature, we suggest that future research should focus on identifying an acceptable level steganographic embedding for biometric applications, securing exchange of steganography keys, identifying and address legal implications, and developing industry standards

A Review on Image mosaicing for secure Transmission of University Exam Question Paper

The rapid spread of the digital world nowadays which is powered by ever faster system demands greater speed and security. Real time to secure an image is a challenging task due to the processing time and computational requirement for RGB image. So, to cope with these concerns, many innovative techniques of image processing for data hiding are required. In this paper new data hiding scheme is proposed which is known as image mosaicing. Image mosaicing is the process of merging split images to produce a single and complete image of the document. For this technique two input images are required one is secret image and second is target image, by merging these two a new image is made called as a mosaic image. So, the creation of mosaic image and lossless recovery of secret input image for question paper security is presented in this paper