Secure web-based communication

Abstract

With the increase in Internet Technologies, great amount of information is following electronically everyday over the network. Information security is a way to protect information against its confidentiality, reliability and availability. Hiding exchange of information is an important factor in the field of security. Cryptography and Steganography are two very important methods for this purpose and are both used to ensure data confidentiality. In Steganography a cover media is used to hide the existence of data where cryptography is used to protect information by transferring plain text into cipher text. Different methods have been studied for multimedia objects but there are very few methods for hiding information into text without altering its integrity. Web based attacks have been a very common practice in recent years and hence need strong security mechanisms for the sake of secret communication. Many robust algorithms can be developed using text Steganography for web pages as they contain a wide amount of bandwidth. A few techniques using web tools like HTML and XML have been proposed but they do not make use of features of these languages very well. This paper discusses some proposed methods, implementations of different embedding techniques and two different ways for hiding data and also a comparative analysis is made based upon some security variables. Text Steganography is applied on XML files and is further encrypted using a cryptographic algorithm.