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Over the last decade, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become increasingly popular, especially with the use of chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and DALL-E. With this rise, large language models (LLMs) and Generative AI (GenAI) have also become more prevalent in everyday use. These advancements strengthen cybersecurity's defensive posture and open up new attack avenues for adversaries as well. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current state-of-the-art deployments of GenAI, covering assaults, jailbreaking, and applications of prompt injection and reverse psychology. This paper also provides the various applications of GenAI in cybercrimes, such as automated hacking, phishing emails, social engineering, reverse cryptography, creating attack payloads, and creating malware. GenAI can significantly improve the automation of defensive cyber security processes through strategies such as dataset construction, safe code development, threat intelligence, defensive measures, reporting, and cyberattack detection. In this study, we suggest that future research should focus on developing robust ethical norms and innovative defense mechanisms to address the current issues that GenAI creates and to also further encourage an impartial approach to its future application in cybersecurity. Moreover, we underscore the importance of interdisciplinary approaches further to bridge the gap between scientific developments and ethical considerations., Comment: 40 pages

The vSPACE experimental proof-of-concept (PoC) on the TrueElect[Anon][Creds] protocol presents a novel approach to secure, private, and scalable elections, extending the TrueElect and ElectAnon protocols with the integration of AnonCreds SSI (Self-Sovereign Identity). Such a protocol PoC is situated within a Zero-Trust Architecture (ZTA) and leverages confidential computing, continuous authentication, multi-party computation (MPC), and well-architected framework (WAF) principles to address the challenges of cybersecurity, privacy, and trust over IP (ToIP) protection. Employing a Kubernetes confidential cluster within an Enterprise-Scale Landing Zone (ESLZ), vSPACE integrates Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) for immutable and certifiable audit trails. The Infrastructure as Code (IaC) model ensures rapid deployment, consistent management, and adherence to security standards, making vSPACE a future-proof solution for digital voting systems.

Decentralised identifiers have become a standardised element of digital identity architecture, with supra-national organisations such as the European Union adopting them as a key component for a unified European digital identity ledger. This paper delves into enhancing security and privacy features within decentralised identifiers by integrating ring signatures as an alternative verification method. This allows users to identify themselves through digital signatures without revealing which public key they used. To this end, the study proposed a novel decentralised identity method showcased in a decentralised identifier-based architectural framework. Additionally, the investigation assesses the repercussions of employing this new method in the verification process, focusing specifically on privacy and security aspects. Although ring signatures are an established asset of cryptographic protocols, this paper seeks to leverage their capabilities in the evolving domain of digital identities.

There is an increasing need to share threat information for the prevention of widespread cyber-attacks. While threat-related information sharing can be conducted through traditional information exchange methods, such as email communications etc., these methods are often weak in terms of their trustworthiness and privacy. Additionally, the absence of a trust infrastructure between different information-sharing domains also poses significant challenges. These challenges include redactment of information, the Right-to-be-forgotten, and access control to the information-sharing elements. These access issues could be related to time bounds, the trusted deletion of data, and the location of accesses. This paper presents an abstraction of a trusted information-sharing process which integrates Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE), Homomorphic Encryption (HE) and Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) integrated into a permissioned ledger, specifically Hyperledger Fabric (HLF). It then provides a protocol exchange between two threat-sharing agents that share encrypted messages through a trusted channel. This trusted channel can only be accessed by those trusted in the sharing and could be enabled for each data-sharing element or set up for long-term sharing.

Given the security concerns of Internet of Things (IoT) networks and limited computational resources of IoT devices, this paper presents RNA-TransCrypt, a novel image encryption scheme that is not only highly secure but also efficient and lightweight. RNA-TransCrypt integrates the biocryptographic properties of RNA encoding with the non-linearity and unpredictability of chaos theory. This scheme introduces three novel contributions: 1) the two-base RNA encoding method, which transforms the image into RNA strands-like sequence, ensuring efficient scrambling; 2) the transformative substitution technique, which transforms the s-box values before replacing the pixel values, and is responsible for making the scheme lightweight; and 3) three mathematical cryptographic operations designed especially for image encryption that ensure the effective transformation of the s-box values, resulting in a new outcome even for the same input values. These modules are key-dependent, utilizing chaotic keys generated by the De Jong Fractal Map and the Van der Pol Oscillator. Extensive security analysis, including histogram analysis, correlation analysis, and the results of the statistical security parameters obtained from the Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) validate the efficacy of the proposed scheme in encrypting input images with close-to-ideal results of 7.997 entropy and 0.0006 correlation.