Computer Science & Information Technology

Mobile phones are considered to be the most common communication devices in history. Recently, mobile phones are not only used for casual greetings but also, sending and receiving important data such as, social security numbers, bank account details and passwords. Public key cryptography is a proven security solution, which can be used to secure the mobile communications. Several researchers have proposed server-based architectures public key cryptography solution to secure the mobile
communications. Third party servers were used to check the certificates, authenticating the communicating parties, key distribution, etc. This paper proposes and implements a non-server (that is, P2P), architecture public key cryptography to secure the mobile communications. The proposed implementation of public key cryptography can provide confidentiality, authentication, integrity and non-repudiation security services needed for mobile communication. Compared with server based
architecture, non-server based architecture has lower risk and the security has been improved, to avoid many kinds of attacks.

With the increasing usage of digital multimedia, the protection of intellectual property rights problem has become a very important issue. Everyday, thousands of multimedia files are being uploaded and downloaded. Therefore, multimedia copyrights become an important issue to protect the intellectual property for the authors of these files. In this paper, the domains of digital audio steganography, the properties of H.A.S, the audio and the digital representation transmission environments, and its software metric, are discussed. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a proper background on the usage of audio file for the purpose of implementing new approaches and techniques in digital watermarking and steganography. ©2011 Academic Journals.

Ad-Hoc networks are decentralized wireless networks. A fundamental problem in Ad-Hoc networks is finding a secure and correct route between a source and a destination efficiently. The need for scalable and energy efficient routing protocols, along with the availability of small, inexpensive and low power positioning instruments, results in making position-based routing protocols a promising choice for mobile Ad-Hoc networks. This paper presents an extensive overview of the existing Ad-Hoc unicast routing protocols that make forwarding decisions based on the geographical position of the destination of a packet, while keeping security issues in mind. We outline the main problems for this class of routing protocols and a qualitative comparison of the existing protocols is done in regards to both security and performance issues. We conclude our work by investigating some future research opportunities.

In this study, we developed a novel method that is able to shift the limit for transparent data hiding in audio from the fourth LSB layer to the eighth LSB layer, thus the method has improved the capacity and robustness of data hiding in the audio file using a two steps approach. In the first step, noise gate software logic used to obtain a desired signal for embedding the secret message of the input host audio signal (carrier). In the second step, standard 8th LSB layer embedding has been done for this desired signal. Audio quality evaluation has used to evaluate our purposed method in two ways. First, objective test showed the algorithm succeeds in this task, while increasing SNR values of our algorithm comparing to SNR values obtained by standard LSB embedding in the 8th bits LSB layer and the comparison of the histogram audio excerpts has proved this also. Second, subjective listening test proved that high perceptual transparency is accomplished even if eight LSB of host audio signal are used for data hiding.

Wireless Ad-Hoc networks are collections of nodes that communicate without any fixed infrastructure. A critical problem in Ad-Hoc networks is finding an efficient and correct route between a source and a destination. The need for scalable and efficient protocols, along with the recent availability of small, inexpensive low-power positioning instruments justify adopting position-based routing protocols in mobile Ad-Hoc networks. This paper presents an overview of the existing Ad-Hoc routing protocols that make forwarding decisions based on the geographical position of a packet's destination. We also outline the main problems for this class of routing protocols. We conclude our findings by discussing opportunities for future research.

Malwares control computer systems by infecting system files. They take advantage of system compatibilities to ensure their survival from one version to another. The structure of the windows portable executable (PE) files between available versions of the windows operating system (OS) makes these files an easy target for malwares. Fields and codes of clean PE files are modified and changed after infection. Checking both changes and modifications is necessary to detect malwares with a minimum false alarm rate. This paper reviews models that propose to detect PE malwares. It discusses PE structure and identifies the fields and locations that are vulnerable to malwares. It also explains the use of the human immune system and co-stimulation signals as a way to build a biological model for
improving the ability of PE malware detection systems.

Mosaic image approaches have been successfully proposed to solve different problems in the image processing such as image segmentation. As it becomes a well known art, there are thousands of mosaic images available in the internet galleries. In addition, there is quite a big number of free mosaic creation software available in the markets. In this paper we will study the features of the mosaic images which can help to implement undetectable data hidden approach (that is steganography approach). Through the research, we found that mosaic image texture is capable to hide up to five LSB layers. Furthermore, there are several papers stated clearly "secure steganography application should be engaged with cryptography". Thus, AES/Rijndael algorithm has been proposed together with the five LSB steganography to ensure the highest rate of data hidden side by side with high level of security. The evaluation of steganography approaches required either objective test (that is passing the SNR, PSNR, MSE or RMSE exam) or subjective test (that is using survey). Many researches conducted to approve the failure of the objective exam. Therefore, we evaluated our approach using the subjective test. Our survey shown the approximate of 99% is the success rate for the mosaic cover, comparing with approximately 50% the success of normal images. © 2010 Academic Journals.

In this study, handshake protocol for patient, medical center and doctor, medical center is proposed for electronic medical record transmission to improve the confidentiality of data transmission and non-repudiation of sending and receiving medical records. The proposed topology depends on symmetric and asymmetric cryptography to achieve high level of secrecy for electronic medical records. The new topology has been described on multi-users (i.e., Doctors and Patient). The new topology has been implemented using Ntru crypto-system and AES encryption method. The proposed solution has been tested to have high level of confidentiality up to the legal age of the medical records.

Short message service (SMS) is a very popular and easy to use communications technology for mobile phone devices. Originally, this service was not designed to transmit secured data, so the security was not an important issue during its design. Yet today, it is sometimes used to exchange sensitive information between communicating parties. This paper proposes an alternative solution that provides a peer-to-peer SMS security that guarantees provision of confidentiality, authentication, integrity and non-repudiation security services. A hybrid cryptographic scheme has been used which combines the NTRU and AES-Rijndael algorithms to achieve more robust functionality. For implementation, a mobile information device application (MIDlet) has been developed in J2ME to introduce a required security services for SMS. The developed application is tested on real equipment such as a Nokia N70. It is able to achieve all the required cryptographic operations completely on the users' mobile phone in less than one second for each operation, and thus the mobile phone performance still remains effective. © 2010 Academic Journals.

Picture-based password has been proposed as an alternative authentication method to replace text-based password. Ensuring the security of picture-based password is not a simple task as picture-based objects are a lot easier to access and remember and can thus be easily guessed. In particular, shoulder surfing attack still remains as the main security threat encountered by many picture-based password authentication schemes, especially in drawmetric authentication scheme. In this paper, a novel shoulder surfing resistance mechanism has been proposed and evaluated. The proposed mechanism utilises penup event and neighbouring connectivity manipulation into a revised Background Pass-Go scheme. From the evaluation result, it has proven that the proposed mechanism achieves better results in resisting shoulder surfing attack while, at the same time, allowing a larger password space.

Wireless Ad-Hoc networks are collection of nodes that can communicate without any fixed infrastructure. A crucial problem in Ad-Hoc networks is finding an efficient route between a source and a destination. The need for scalable and energy efficient protocols, along with the recent availability of small, inexpensive and low power positioning instruments justify introducing position based routing algorithms in mobile Ad-Hoc networks. This paper presents an overview and a qualitative comparison of the existing Ad-Hoc routing protocols that make forwarding decisions based on the geographical position of a packet's destination. We conclude our findings by investigating opportunities for future research.

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) are becoming increasingly popular as more and more mobile devices find their way to the public. A crucial problem in Ad-Hoc networks is finding an efficient route between a source and a destination. Due to MANET’s inherent characteristics, secure routing may be one of the most difficult areas to tackle because opponents can add themselves to a MANET using the existing common routing protocols. Hence, this paper proposed a new model of routing protocol called ARANz, which is an extension of the original Authenticated Routing for Ad-Hoc Networks (ARAN). Apart from the authentication methods adopted from ARAN, ARANz aims to increase security, achieve robustness and solve the single point of failure and attack problems by introducing multiple Local Certificate Authority servers. Moreover, by dealing with the network as zones and using restricted directional flooding, our new model will exhibit better scalability and performance. An overview and a qualitative comparison between ARANz and some existing Ad-Hoc routing protocols is presented in this paper.

Steganography is the idea of hiding private, sensitive data or information within something that appears to be nothing but normal. If a person views the digital object that the information is hidden inside, he or she will have no idea that there is any hidden information, therefore the person will not attempt to decrypt the information, this is the main objective behind steganography. In this paper we extend a work approved two approaches from LSB algorithm; the 3-3-2 approach without any limitations on the type of images being used and can reach up to 33.3% of size of hidden data, and the second one is the 4-4-4 approach which increase the amount up to 50 % of hidden data from the size of image but with certain limitations on the type of images, the new approach features will increase the data hidden in the image by merge the above approaches. Image texture and edge detection has been involve to appoint the appreciate sample from the image with the suitable approach.

Secure group communication allows a set of nodes (or devices) to communicate securely amongst each other over unprotected and open networks. Provision of security for group communication is based on cryptographic services, which relies on careful management of cryptographic keying material. Securing group communication in wired networks is fairly well understood, however wireless networks introduce further challenges as group members may move from one place to another while still remaining in a group session. In this paper we propose a host mobility protocol to govern group member movement in wireless mobile environments. We introduce the use of lists as part of our protocol design in order to facilitate host mobility

A honeypot is a computer resource that is deployed in the network to attract attackers. It is designed to be attacked and misused by them. The functionality of a honeypot depends on its technical configuration made by the system administrators. To properly blend in with the environment, a honeypot must be configured to mimic the production hosts within the network environment which is very dynamic. This paper reviews research on dynamic and intelligent honeypots.

In this paper a new approach of image steganography has been proposed that hides a gray scale secret image into colored (BMP) image. The proposed approach has two phases, in the first phase we compress the secret image using artificial neural network technique and in the second phase, we hide the secret image using Least Significant bit substitution method. By combining these two techniques our proposed approach increases the capacity of data hidden effectively and efficiently to (88.8906%) of the image size with no noticeable distortion on the carrier images.

Malwares control computer systems by infecting system files. They take advantage of system compatibilities to ensure their survival from one version to another. The structure of the windows portable executable (PE) files between available versions of the windows operating system (OS) makes these files an easy target for malwares. Fields and codes of clean PE files are modified and changed after infection. Checking both changes and modifications is necessary to detect malwares with a minimum false alarm rate. This paper reviews models that propose to detect PE malwares. It discusses PE structure and identifies the fields and locations that are vulnerable to malwares. It also explains the use of the human immune system and co-stimulation signals as a way to build a biological model for improving the ability of PE malware detection systems.

Major provisioning of cloud computing is mainly delivered via Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service. However, these service delivery models are vulnerable to a range of security attacks, exploiting both cloud specific and existing web service vulnerabilities. Taxonomies are a useful tool for system designers as they provide a systematic way of understanding, identifying and addressing security risks. In this research work, Cloud based attacks and vulnerabilities are collected and classify with respect to their cloud models. We also present taxonomy of cloud security attacks and potential mitigation strategies with the aim of providing an in-depth understanding of security requirements in the cloud environment. We also highlight the importance of intrusion detection and prevention as a service.

For the last few years, academia and research organizations are continuously investigating and resolving the security and privacy issues of mobile cloud computing environment. The additional consideration in designing security services for mobile cloud computing environment should be the resource-constrained mobile devices. The execution of computationally intensive security services on mobile device consumes battery's charging quickly. In this regard, the study presents a novel energy-efficient block-based sharing scheme that provides confidentiality and integrity services for mobile users in the cloud environment. The block-based sharing scheme is compared with the existing schemes on the basis of energy consumption, CPU utilization, memory utilization, encryption time, decryption time, and turnaround time. The experimen

Abstract—Steganography is the idea of hiding private, sensitive data or information within something that appears to be nothing but normal. If a person views the digital object that the information is hidden inside, he or she will have no idea that there is any hidden information, therefore the person will not attempt to decrypt the information, this is the main objective behind steganography. In this paper we extend a work approved two approaches from LSB algorithm; the 3-3-2 approach without any limitations on the type of images being used ...