Bitwise Exclusive-or Operation Research Articles

Distributed integrity and non-repudiation scheme in the dynamic vehicular cloud environment

Data storage is one of the major applications of vehicular cloud computing (VCC) where the data is shared concurrently among many vehicles participating in vehicular communications. Integrity and non-repudiation are some of the important security challenges encountered during the provisioning of data storage services. This paper proposes an integrity and non-repudiation verification scheme in a dynamic vehicular cloud storage environment. Vehicle authentication is performed by employing Boneh-Lynn-Shacham (BLS) short signature mechanism. The cryptographic hash function and bitwise exclusive-OR (XOR) operation provide data integrity checking of messages which are uploaded from the vehicle to the cloud. RSU acts as a trusted verifier for data transactions. We evaluated the efficiency of the proposed scheme against standard attacks such as replay attack and tampering attack. Extensive simulations are carried out and the results are compared to ID-based cryptographic schemes. The scheme proposed achieved better in terms of computation overhead, average throughput and communication overhead.

Energy Efficient Dynamic Symmetric Key Based Protocol for Secure Traffic Exchanges in Smart Homes

Highly sensitive information about people’s social life and daily activities flows in smart home networks. As such, if attackers can manage to capture or even eavesdrop on this information, the privacy of the users can be compromised. The consequences can be far-reaching, such as knowing the status of home occupancy that can then facilitate burglary. To address these challenges, approaches such as data aggregation and signcryption have been utilized. Elliptic curve cryptography, bilinear pairing, asymmetric key cryptosystem, blockchain, and exponential operations are among the most popular techniques deployed to design these security solutions. However, the computational, storage and communication complexities exhibited by the majority of these techniques are too high. This renders these techniques unsuitable for smart home components such as smart switches and sensors. Some of these schemes have centralized architectures, which present some single points of failure. In this paper, symmetric key authentication procedures are presented for smart home networks. The proposed protocol leverages on cryptographic primitives such as one-way hashing and bitwise exclusive-Or operations. The results indicate that this scheme incurs the lowest communication, storage, and computation costs compared to other related state-of-the-art techniques. Empirically, our protocol reduces the communication and computation complexities by 16.7% and 57.7%, respectively. In addition, it provides backward key secrecy, robust mutual authentication, anonymity, forward key secrecy, and unlinkability. Moreover, it can effectively prevent attacks such as impersonation, session hijacking, denial of service, packet replays, man-in-the-middle, and message eavesdropping.

Reversible data hiding in encrypted image with local-correlation-based classification and adaptive encoding strategy

In recent years, reversible data hiding in encrypted images has attracted more and more attention due to its wide application in secret information transmission and image content protection. In this paper, we propose a reversible data hiding scheme for encrypted image based on classification and multi-layer processing. The image owner utilizes a block-level encryption method, including block-level bitwise exclusive-or operation and block permutation, to obtain encrypted image such that the correlation of pixels in most blocks is preserved. Therefore, there provably exist identical consecutive high-order bit planes (ICHOBPs) from the most significant bit (MSB) where the number of ICHOBPs is defined as local correlation. Further, a local-correlation-based classification mechanism is proposed such that these blocks can be classified into different types. The data hider adopts multi-layer processing to fully exploit the local correlation in each block. First, ICHOBPs of each block are utilized as redundant space for data embedding. For those blocks with a small number of ICHOBPs, an adaptive coding strategy is proposed to improve embedding capacity. Especially for those blocks whose correlation is not well preserved, we propose a special processing method to exploit redundant space. Experimental results show that our method can effectively improve the embedding capacity than other similar ones with keeping high quality in security analysis.

SELWAK: A Secure and Efficient Lightweight and Anonymous Authentication and Key Establishment Scheme for IoT Based Vehicular Ad hoc Networks.

In recent decades, Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) have emerged as a promising field that provides real-time communication between vehicles for comfortable driving and human safety. However, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) platform faces some serious problems in the deployment of robust authentication mechanisms in resource-constrained environments and directly affects the efficiency of existing VANET schemes. Moreover, the security of the information becomes a critical issue over an open wireless access medium. In this paper, an efficient and secure lightweight anonymous mutual authentication and key establishment (SELWAK) for IoT-based VANETs is proposed. The proposed scheme requires two types of mutual authentication: V2V and V2R. In addition, SELWAK maintains secret keys for secure communication between Roadside Units (RSUs). The performance evaluation of SELWAK affirms that it is lightweight in terms of computational cost and communication overhead because SELWAK uses a bitwise Exclusive-OR operation and one-way hash functions. The formal and informal security analysis of SELWAK shows that it is robust against man-in-the-middle attacks, replay attacks, stolen verifier attacks, stolen OBU attacks, untraceability, impersonation attacks, and anonymity. Moreover, a formal security analysis is presented using the Real-or-Random (RoR) model.

Ultra-high speed random bit generation based on Rayleigh feedback assisted ytterbium-doped random fiber laser

In this paper, we propose an ultra-high speed random bit generator without the time-delay signature based on an ytterbium-doped random fiber laser (YRFL) with Rayleigh scattering feedback. The spectrum of the YRFL has a relatively broad bandwidth (0.35 nm) and the lasing temporal intensity shows random fluctuations without cavity induced time-delay signatures (TDS), which are essential for ultra-high speed random bit generation The chaotic signal and its time-delayed signal sampling at 40 Giga samples per second (GS/s) are converted to digital 8-bit signals. By selecting 5 least significant bits from each 8-bit digital signal and using bitwise exclusive-OR operation, we experimentally achieve 200 Gbps physical random bit generation based on ytterbium-doped random fiber laser with the verified randomness. The combination of broadband emission and free of TDS makes random fiber lasers new promising sources for high performance random bit generation in a simple and compact configuration, which has a great potential in cryptography and secure communication applications.

Reversible data hiding in encrypted images with block-based adaptive MSB encoding

Contemporary cloud storage and social media networks have matured and; as a result, the privacy protection of image content in these applications have attracted more attention. Reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDHEI) is an efficient technique to embed additional data such as timestamps, watermarks, and copyright information into encrypted images to protect the image content. This paper proposes a reversible data hiding scheme in encrypted images based on a block-based adaptive MSB encoding technique (BAME-RDHEI). The content owner first uses a block-based image encryption method, including block permutation, pixel permutation in each block, and the block-based bitwise exclusive-or operation, to encrypt an image. This specific image encryption method preserves the relevance of the MSB bit planes in each block, and the block-based adaptive MSB encoding technique can be applied to classify and encode eight block types according to the number of MSB bit planes where all the values are all ‘1’ or ‘0’. After embedding the indicators that are generated by Huffman coding into the first MSB bit plane of each block, the remaining values of these MSB bit planes can be vacated for data embedding. The receiver can extract additional data, decrypted the image or recover the original image according to the different keys. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed scheme provides enhanced security, significantly improves the embedding rate, and obtains higher visual quality for the decrypted image compared to other state-of-the-art schemes.

A Novel Double-Image Encryption Algorithm Based on Rossler Hyperchaotic System and Compressive Sensing

In this paper, a novel double-image compression-encryption algorithm is proposed by combining Rossler hyperchaos and compressive sensing. In the proposed scheme, the sparse matrixes obtained by performing two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform on two plain images are first scrambled and compressed by index confusion and compressive sensing. Next, the compressed matrixes are linearly quantized, and then variable step length Josephus confusion and bitwise exclusive-OR operation are performed on them. The final noise-like cipher image is generated by hiding half of the encrypted image into the alpha channel of the other half of encrypted image. In order to realize “One cipher image corresponds to one key”, a novel key generation mechanism is designed. Finally, the simulation analyses indicate that the proposed double-image encryption scheme has high transmission efficiency. Meanwhile, the average local information entropy of the cipher image is about 0.902 and the decryption quality is as high as 30 dB.

A robust video zero-watermarking based on deep convolutional neural network and self-organizing map in polar complex exponential transform domain

In this paper, a robust video zero-watermarking scheme for copyright protection using a combination of convolutional neural network (CNN) and self-organizing map (SOM) in polar complex exponential transform (PCET) space is presented. The scheme is developed not only to remedy the existing problems of lacking in some performance assessments but also to enhance the robustness. It starts with extracting the content feature of each frame by CNN and then some significant frames are selected using SOM clustering and maximum entropy. Secondly, the PCET is applied to all selected frames to abstract invariant moments, and further, is scrambled by a chaotic logistic map and is reduced in dimensions by singular value decomposition (SVD). Next, a binary sequence is generated by comparing adjacent values of the obtained compact PCET moments in the previous step, and further is permuted to produce a binary matrix. Finally, a bitwise exclusive-OR operation is imposed on the binary matrix and the encrypted watermark by the chaotic map to generate a zero-watermark signal. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme has adequate equalization and distinguishability of zero-watermarks as well as strong robustness against common signal processing, geometric, compression, and inter-frame attacks. Also, compared with existing video zero-watermarking and traditional video watermarking methods, the proposed scheme exhibits superior robustness.

Secure and Lightweight Authentication With Key Agreement for Smart Wearable Systems

Nowadays, an increasing number of wearable devices (WDs) have been widely deployed in smart wearable systems to collect health status measures and body information of users. Due to the openness of wireless transmission and the low capabilities of WDs in terms of energy and computation, it is of a great challenge to ensure the security of the users' physiological information. In this article, we propose a secure and lightweight authentication and key agreement scheme (SLAKA) by using the fuzzy extractor, the cryptographic hash function, and the bitwise exclusive-or operation. In SLAKA, mutual authentication between a WD and the mobile terminal (MT) can be achieved, after that, a session key can be negotiated at both ends for future secure communications. Detailed security analysis shows that SLAKA has the resilience against various well-known attacks, such as replay attacks, stolen/lost MT/WD attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, MT/WD impersonation attacks, password change attacks, anonymity and untraceability attacks, and privileged-insider attacks. Through performance comparison and extensive simulation, SLAKA is demonstrated to be more efficient than the existing schemes, while providing more extractive features and security guarantees.

Lightweight multi-factor mutual authentication protocol for IoT devices

The Internet-of-Things (IoT), which refers to the interconnection of heterogeneous devices, has gained a lot of interest lately, and it witnessed a large growth in the number of IoT devices due to the importance of such systems in today’s communication networks. On the other hand, the authentication of entities (devices) is a major concern and a main security challenge in IoT systems since any weakness in the identification or authentication process will allow a compromised entity to establish communication, inject false data and launch dangerous attacks leading to system malfunction. Currently, most IoT authentication mechanisms are based on single-factor cryptographic solutions. These techniques are not practical for IoT devices that have limited computational capabilities. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and secure multi-factor device authentication protocol for IoT devices. The scheme is based on two concepts, configurable physical unclonable functions (PUF) within IoT devices, and channel-based parameters. It uses few and simple cryptographic operations such as the bit-wise exclusive-OR operation and a one-way hash function. The unique PUF value serves as the mutual secret identifier between a pair of users, which frequently changes for every session. Moreover, the proposed protocol exploits the random channel characteristics to provide high robustness against different kinds of attacks, while maintaining low complexity. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work that combines physical layer security with PUFs to authenticate communicating devices, dynamically. Security and performance analysis prove the security and efficiency of the proposed protocol, which is designed with minimum overhead in terms of computations and communication costs.

Robust and secure zero-watermarking algorithm for color images based on majority voting pattern and hyper-chaotic encryption

Robust zero-watermarking is an effective and distortion-free technique for copyright protection and has become a research hotspot in the field of digital watermarking. In the face of weak robustness and security of existing schemes, this paper presents a novel robust and secure color image zero-watermarking algorithm based on majority voting pattern and hyper-chaotic encryption. In the proposed algorithm, firstly an original color image is decomposed by one-level discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and the corresponding low-frequency components of three channels are partitioned into blocks. Then, to resist strong attacks, we construct a distinguishable robust binary feature matrix extracted from all blocks and color components by using a combination of Frobenius norm in the singular value decomposition (SVD) domain and majority voting pattern. To promote security, a binary copyright logo is confused and diffused by hyper-chaotic Lorenz system. Finally, it performs a bitwise exclusive-or operation on the binary feature matrix and the encrypted copyrighted logo to obtain a zero-watermark signal. Experimental results indicate that in addition to the high-level security, the proposed zero-watermarking algorithm also has a stronger robustness against common geometric and non-geometric attacks, including rotation, scaling, filtering, JPEG compression and noise addition, compared with some existing typical zero-watermarking and traditional watermarking methods.

Ultrafast physical random bit generation from a chaotic oscillator with a silicon modulator.

We demonstrate physical random bit (PRB) generation from two chaotic optoelectronic oscillators (OEOs) with silicon Mach-Zehnder and microring resonator modulators. The carrier-injection modulation and the beam interference provide the nonlinearity for the OEO. We digitalize the chaotic waveforms from the two OEOs at 40GS/s with 8-bit resolution and use self-delay bitwise exclusive-or operation as a post-processing method. The randomness of the resulting 320Gbps PRB sequences is verified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication 800-22 statistical tests. With the progress of silicon photonic circuits, there is a potential to fabricate a monolithic chaotic OEO chip for compact PRB generation.

Ternary radial harmonic Fourier moments based robust stereo image zero-watermarking algorithm

With the development and popularization of computer network technology, the copyright protection of stereo images is a serious problem to be solved. Based on ternary number theory and radial harmonic Fourier moments (RHFM), ternary radial harmonic Fourier moments (TRHFM) is proposed to deal with stereo images in a holistic manner, and based on this moment, this paper proposes a robust stereo image zero-watermarking algorithm. We first compute the TRHFM of the original stereo image, and we randomly select TRHFMs using logistic mapping; then, we obtain a binary feature image using the magnitudes of the selected TRHFMs, and finally, we apply a bitwise exclusive-or operation on permuted logo image and binary feature image to obtain the zero-watermark image. Experimental results indicate that the proposed stereo image zero-watermarking algorithm is strongly robust to various asymmetric and symmetric attacks and has superiority compared with other zero-watermarking algorithms.

Improved multiple secret sharing using generalized chaotic image scrambling

This paper presents a new technique on (n, n)-Multiple Secret Sharing (MSS) of color images. In this task, n shared images are generated from n secret images, while n recovered secret images can be reconstructed from n shared images. The proposed method employs the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) and bitwise eXclusive-OR (XOR) operation for generating a set of shared image from a set of secret images. The proposed method improves the security level of (n, n)- MSS scheme by developing and utilizing the generalized chaotic image scrambling. This image scrambling effectively overcomes the problem on former existing MSS scheme while the number of secret images is odd number. As documented in experimental section, the proposed method offers a good result on (n, n)- MSS task. At the same time, the proposed method outperforms the former exising schemes in the MSS field.

Privacy-Preserving and Lightweight Key Agreement Protocol for V2G in the Social Internet of Things

The concept of the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) can be viewed as the integration of prevailing social networking and the Internet of Things, which is making inroads into the daily operation of many industries. Smart grids, which are cost-effective and environmentally friendly applications, are a promising field of the SIoT. However, security and privacy concerns are the dark aspects of smart grids. The goal of this paper is to address the security and privacy issues in the vehicle-togrid (V2G) networks with the intention of promoting a more extensive deployment of V2G networks for smart grids. Driven by this motivation, in this paper, we propose a robust key agreement protocol that can achieve mutual authentication without exposing the real identities of users. Efficiency is also a major concern in resource-constrained environments. By leveraging only hash functions and bitwise exclusive-OR operations, the proposed protocol is highly efficient compared with pairing-based protocols. In addition, we define a formal security model for our privacy-preserving key agreement protocol for V2G networks. Using this model, a formal security analysis shows that the proposed protocol is secure. Moreover, an informal security analysis demonstrates that our protocol can withstand different types of attacks.

An Enhanced Lightweight Anonymous Authentication Scheme for a Scalable Localization Roaming Service in Wireless Sensor Networks.

More security concerns and complicated requirements arise in wireless sensor networks than in wired networks, due to the vulnerability caused by their openness. To address this vulnerability, anonymous authentication is an essential security mechanism for preserving privacy and providing security. Over recent years, various anonymous authentication schemes have been proposed. Most of them reveal both strengths and weaknesses in terms of security and efficiency. Recently, Farash et al. proposed a lightweight anonymous authentication scheme in ubiquitous networks, which remedies the security faults of previous schemes. However, their scheme still suffers from certain weaknesses. In this paper, we prove that Farash et al.’s scheme fails to provide anonymity, authentication, or password replacement. In addition, we propose an enhanced scheme that provides efficiency, as well as anonymity and security. Considering the limited capability of sensor nodes, we utilize only low-cost functions, such as one-way hash functions and bit-wise exclusive-OR operations. The security and lightness of the proposed scheme mean that it can be applied to roaming service in localized domains of wireless sensor networks, to provide anonymous authentication of sensor nodes.

An image encryption scheme combining chaos with cycle operation for DNA sequences

An image encryption scheme is proposed using high-dimensional chaotic systems and cycle operation for DNA sequences. In the scheme, the pixels of the original image are encoded randomly with the DNA coding rule controlled by a key stream produced from Chen’s hyper-chaos. In addition to confusion on the DNA sequence matrix with Lorenz system, a cycle operation for DNA sequences is projected to diffuse the pixel values of the image. In order to enhance the diffusion effect, a bitwise exclusive-OR operation is carried out for the decoded matrices with a binary key stream, and then the cipher-image is obtained. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed image encryption scheme with acceptable robustness is secure against exhaustive attack, statistical attack and differential attack.

A lightweight authentication scheme based on self-updating strategy for space information network

The security of space information network SIN is getting more and more important now. Because of the special features of SIN e.g., the dynamic and unstable topology, the highly exposed links, the restricted computation power, the flexible networking methods, and so on, the security protocol for SIN should have a balance between security properties and computation/storage overhead. Although a lot of security protocols have been proposed recently, few can provide overall attacks resistance power with low computation and storage cost. To solve this problem, in this paper we propose a lightweight authentication scheme for space information network. It is mainly based on the self-updating strategy for user's temporary identity. The scheme consists of two phases, namely, the registration phase and the authentication phase. All the computing operations involved are just hash function h, the bit-wise exclusive-or operation i¾?, and the string concatenation operation ||, which are of low computation cost. The security properties discussion and the attacks-resistance power analysis show that the proposed authentication scheme can defend against various typical attacks, especially denial of service attacks. It is sufficiently secure with the lowest computation and storage costs. Furthermore, the formal security proof in SVO logic also demonstrates that the scheme can satisfy the security goals very well. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Lightweight Authenticated Communication Scheme for Smart Grid

In smart grid, various kinds of sensors have been equipped in smart meters to collect real-time consumption data and execute the instructions from the power management center, which leads to a more robust and customer-friendly grid system. However, a smart grid enables the two-way communication between the electricity supplier and users, which brings security challenges to the smart grid. In this paper, we propose a lightweight authenticated communication scheme for the smart grid, which ensures a secure two-way communication between the smart meters and the neighborhood gateway. Since in the proposed scheme, the smart meters only need to execute the bitwise exclusive-OR operations to encrypt collected usage data, and Lagrange interpolation formula is used to authenticate the sender; the transmitted messages can be real-timely authenticated. On the other side, the storage burden and communication cost of the smart meters can be significantly reduced. The security analysis shows that the messages transmission between the smart meters and the neighborhood gateway can be done in a confidential and authenticated manner. Furthermore, compared with other existing schemes, the performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme has both lower storage and communication cost.

A Novel Image Encryption Algorithm Based on DNA Encoding and Spatiotemporal Chaos

DNA computing based image encryption is a new, promising field. In this paper, we propose a novel image encryption scheme based on DNA encoding and spatiotemporal chaos. In particular, after the plain image is primarily diffused with the bitwise Exclusive-OR operation, the DNA mapping rule is introduced to encode the diffused image. In order to enhance the encryption, the spatiotemporal chaotic system is used to confuse the rows and columns of the DNA encoded image. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed encryption algorithm is of high key sensitivity and large key space, and it can resist brute-force attack, entropy attack, differential attack, chosen-plaintext attack, known-plaintext attack and statistical attack.