With the advance of telematic technology, increasing document image information utilized in the state of soft copy is expected. In these situations, copies of obtained document image information are made illegally with ease, and hence the validity authentication of the information itself and its provider becomes more necessary. Since document image information to be authenticated exists in a form which can be read at an unidentified number of receiver terminals, the realization of an authentication scheme where document image and signature are combined is necessary. This is characteristic of document image information including nature pictures and photographs.



This paper proposes a new concept of signature, which is called “digital watermark” for document image communication. A digital watermark is the coding scheme in which secret information is embedded into a document image similar to a watermark. Image coding schemes already proposed are available to realize a digital watermark. We present a method of obtaining a digital watermark using a well-known predictive coding algorithm. Also, we define a criterion for security and show to what extent the digital signature is safe using simulation results, where two or three illegal actions are considered.

A proposal on digital watermark in document image communication and its application to realizing a signature

Hash functions were introduced in cryptology in the late seventies as a tool to protect the authenticity of information. Soon it became clear that they were a very useful building block to solve other security problems in telecommunication and computer networks. This paper sketches the history of the concept, discusses the applications of hash functions, and presents the approaches that have been followed to construct hash functions. In addition, it tries to provide the information which is necessary to choose a practical hash function. An overview of practical constructions and their performance is given and some attacks are discussed. Special attention is paid to standards dealing with hash functions.

Cryptographic hash functions

Cryptosystems are tested by subjecting them to cryptanalytic attacks by experts. Most of the cryptosystems that have been publicly proposed in the last decade have been broken. Some of the attacks that have been used are outlined, and some of the basic tools available to the cryptanalyst are explained. Attacks on the knapsack cryptosystems, congruential generators, and a variety of two key secrecy and signature schemes are discussed. There is also a brief discussion of the status of the security of cryptosystems for which there is no known feasible attack, such as the RSA, discrete exponentiation, and DES cryptosystems. >

Cryptanalysis: a survey of recent results

Although quantum computing is still in its nascent age, its evolution threatens the most popular public-key encryption systems. Such systems are essential for today’s Internet security due to their ability for solving the key distribution problem and for providing high security in insecure communications channels that allow for accessing websites or for exchanging e-mails, financial transactions, digitally signed documents, military communications or medical data. Cryptosystems like Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA), elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) or Diffie–Hellman have spread worldwide and are part of diverse key Internet standards like Transport Layer Security (TLS), which are used both by traditional computers and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It is especially difficult to provide high security to IoT devices, mainly because many of them rely on batteries and are resource constrained in terms of computational power and memory, which implies that specific energy-efficient and lightweight algorithms need to be designed and implemented for them. These restrictions become relevant challenges when implementing cryptosystems that involve intensive mathematical operations and demand substantial computational resources, which are often required in applications where data privacy has to be preserved for the long term, like IoT applications for defense, mission-critical scenarios or smart healthcare. Quantum computing threatens such a long-term IoT device security and researchers are currently developing solutions to mitigate such a threat. This article provides a survey on what can be called post-quantum IoT systems (IoT systems protected from the currently known quantum computing attacks): the main post-quantum cryptosystems and initiatives are reviewed, the most relevant IoT architectures and challenges are analyzed, and the expected future trends are indicated. Thus, this article is aimed at providing a wide view of post-quantum IoT security and give useful guidelines to the future post-quantum IoT developers.

From Pre-Quantum to Post-Quantum IoT Security: A Survey on Quantum-Resistant Cryptosystems for the Internet of Things

Requirements for cryptographic hash functions

Digital signature techniques such as the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) scheme can be used to establish both the authenticity of a document and the identity of its originator. However, because of the computationally-intensive nature of the RSA algorithm, most digital signature schemes make use of a checksum technique to summarize or represent the document, and then digitally sign the checksum. Message authentication codes (MACs), based on the Data Encryption Standard (DES), are often used for this purpose. It is shown that cryptographic checksums that are intended to detect fraudulent messages must be on the order of 128 bits in length, and the ANSI X9.9-1986 message authentication standard is criticized on that basis. In addition, architectural arguments are advanced to illustrate the advantages of a checksum algorithm that is not based on the use of cryptography and does not require the use of a secret key. Manipulation detection codes (MDC) are defined as a class of checksum algorithms that can detect both accidental and malicious modifications of an electronic message or document, without requiring the use of a cryptographic key.

R. R. Jueneman

Papers

Electronic document authentication