IAES Nawala: Cryptography

Greetings, fellow Nawala! May you always be in good health.

This is the IAES Nawala of the Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. Today we will share news about the development of cryptography. Cryptography is the science of secure communication techniques that protect information from unauthorized access or modification during transmission or storage. It involves the use of mathematical algorithms to convert plaintext (original data) into ciphertext (encrypted data) and vice versa. The main purpose of cryptography is to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of data. Oladipupo and Abikoye (2022) developed Modified Playfair (MPF), where Playfair is an old encryption model that has been redeveloped and updated to improve its reliability. More details regarding MPF can be seen in the following article:

Modified Playfair cryptosystem for improved data security

Esau Taiwo Oladipupo, Oluwakemi Christiana Abikoye

Playfair is the earliest known classical block cipher which is capable of taking two characters as a unit in the process of encryption and decryption. However, the cipher is suffering from vulnerability to many cryptanalysis attacks due to a lack of confusion and diffusion properties, an inability to handle numbers and special characters in the process of encryption and decryption, and a host of other deficiencies. Although several modifications and improvements had been done by different researchers, the emphasis has been on the modification of the key matrix to accommodate more characters to increase the keyspace. No attention has been given to increment in the size of the block that the Playfair cipher can handle at a time. In this paper, a modified Playfair (MPF) cryptosystem that is capable of handling different block sizes with high diffusion and confusion properties is developed. cryptanalysis of the developed cryptosystem was carried out and the results show that the MPF cryptosystem is resistant to Known plaintext attack, chosen-plaintext attack, chosen ciphertext attack, frequency analysis attack, autocorrelation attack, differential cryptanalysis attacks, entropy attacks, brute force attack, and can handle variable block sizes.

Talking about cryptography, it is not far to discuss steganography. Mohammed (2022) made research regarding the combination of cryptography and steganography. In his research, cryptographic measures help to provide secure text by reversing and transforming the text into a more secure structure that is unreadable and undetectable by normal users. On the other hand, the developed steganography process is divided into two levels: first hiding the text inside the image, then hiding the image with the text inside the audio file. A more complete explanation can be found in the following article:

A new approach to hide texts into images and audio files using steganography and cryptography techniques

Miran Hikmat Mohammed

These days there are many security issues facing users while they are using the internet for exchanging information among them. And, users use technology devices, such as mobiles and computers, and they connect them to the network and internet. Therefore, users always looking for a safe way to exchange information locally and globally, when they are connecting to a network. Also, these problems lead them to many further issues such as losing privacy, hacking, and detecting personal information. Although, many security techniques have been used to solve these issues by creating many different software utilities; some of them worked perfectly to some extent, while some others still did not comply with the security environment. This research paper finds a new methodology to secure text information while exchanging among permitted users over the internet. This method is a combination of cryptography and steganography with audio and imaging multimedia, which works on hiding and encrypting information before sending it over a network. As result, this technique will add additional security processes to the data exchange, and it will provide a more reliable environment for the user to connect to the network. In addition, the quality of the data will not be altered or noticed during the encryption and decryption process.

Secure data transmission is very important, yet difficult to implement. Highly confidential medical data requires the role of cryptography and steganography to ensure its security. Jabbar and Issa (2023) conducted research on implementing crypto-steganography to transmit medical data securely. A more complete explanation of how they implemented it can be seen in the following article:

A crypto-steganography healthcare management: towards a secure communication channel for data COVID-19 updating

Mohanad Sameer Jabbar, Samer Saeed Issa

Nowadays, secure transmission massive volumes of medical data (such as COVID-19 data) are crucial but yet difficult in communication between hospitals. The confidentiality and integrity are two concerning challenges must be addressing to healthcare data. Also, the data availability challenge that related to network fail which may reason concerns to the arrival the COVID-19 data. The second challenge solved with the different tools such as virtual privet network (VPN) or blockchain technology. Towards overcoming the aforementioned for first challenges, a new scheme based on crypto steganography is proposed to secure updating (COVID-19) data. Three main contributions have been consisted within this study. The first contribution is responsible to encrypt the COVID-19 data prior to the embedding process, called hybrid cryptography (HC). The second contribution is related with the security in random blocks and pixels selection in hosting image. Three iterations of the Hénon Map function used with this contribution. The last contribution called inversing method which used with embedding process. Three important measurements were used the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), the Histogram analysis and structural similarity index measure (SSIM). Based on the findings, the present scheme gives evidence to increase capacity, imperceptibility, and security to ovoid the existing methods problem.

The above articles are just a small part of the research on the development of cryptography. To get more information, readers can visit the page and read articles for FREE through the following links: https://ijeecs.iaescore.com/,  http://iaesprime.com/index.php/csit/, and https://ijaas.iaescore.com/.