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Hash functions serve as a fundamental cryptographic primitives and are used in numerous security fields, such as cloud audit, digital signature, block chain and random number generation. Recent years, cryptographers have long delved into parallel hash functions to design more efficient cryptographic primitives. This paper proposes a multi-iterative parallel hash function. Moreover, inside this parallel structure, a four branch parallel compression structure is proposed to accelerate message diffusion. Simulation results show the proposed hash scheme has great performance on both efficiency and security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experts and researchers in the field of information security have placed a high value on the security of image data in the last few years. They have presented several image encryption techniques that are more secure. To increase the security level of image encryption algorithms, this article offers an efficient diffusion approach for image encryption methods based on onedimensional Logistic, three-dimensional Lorenz, DNA encoding and computing, and SHA-256. The encryption test demonstrates that the method has great security and reliability. This article, also, examines the security of encryption methods, such as secret key space analysis, key sensitivity test, histogram analysis, information entropy process, correlation examination, and differential attack. When the image encryption method described in this article is compared to several previous image encryption techniques, the encryption algorithm has higher information entropy and a lower correlation coefficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of 5G and 6G networks has enhanced the ability of massive IoT devices to provide real-time monitoring and interaction with the surrounding environment. Despite recent advances, the necessary security services, such as immediate and continuous authentication, high scalability, and cybersecurity handling of IoT cannot be achieved in a single broadcast authentication protocol. This paper presents a new hybrid protocol called Hybrid Two-level µ-timed-efficient stream loss-tolerant authentication (Hybrid TLI-µTESLA) protocol, which maximizes the benefits of the previous TESLA protocol variants, including scalability support and immediate authentication of Multilevel-µTESLA protocol and continuous authentication with minimal computation overhead of enhanced Inf-TESLA protocol. The inclusion of three different keychains and checking criteria of the packets in the Hybrid TLI-µTESLA protocol enabled resistance against Masquerading, Modification, Man-in-the-Middle, Brute-force, and DoS attacks. A solution for the authentication problem in the first and last packets of the high-level and low-level keychains of the Multilevel-µTESLA protocol was also proposed. The simulation analysis was performed using Java, where we compared the Hybrid TLI-µTESLA protocol with other variants for time complexity and computation overhead at the sender and receiver sides. We also conducted a comparative analysis between two hash functions, SHA-2 and SHA-3, and assessed the feasibility of the proposed protocol in the forthcoming 6G technology. The results demonstrated the superiority of the proposed protocol over other variants in terms of immediate and continuous authentication, scalability, cybersecurity, lifetime, network performance, and compatibility with 5G and 6G IoT generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a Quantum inspired Hash Function using controlled alternate quantum walks with Memory on cycles (QHFM), where the $j$th message bit decides whether to run quantum walk with one-step memory or to run quantum walk with two-step memory at the $j$th time step, and the hash value is calculated from the resulting probability distribution of the walker. Numerical simulation shows that the proposed hash function has near-ideal statistical performance and is at least on a par with the state-of-the-art hash functions based on quantum walks in terms of sensitivity of hash value to message, diffusion and confusion properties, uniform distribution property, and collision resistance property; and theoretical analysis indicates that the time and space complexity of the new scheme are not greater than those of its peers. The good performance of QHFM suggests that quantum walks that differ not only in coin operators but also in memory lengths can be combined to build good hash functions, which, in turn, enriches the construction of controlled alternate quantum walks.

Secure communication is important for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, to avoid cyber-security attacks. One of the key security aspects is data integrity, which can be protected by employing cryptographic hash functions. Recently, US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced a competition to standardize lightweight hash functions, which can be used in IoT applications. IoT communication involves various hardware platforms, from low-end microcontrollers to high-end cloud servers with GPU accelerators. Since many sensor nodes are connected to the gateway devices and cloud servers, performing high throughput integrity check is important to secure IoT applications. However, this is a time consuming task even for high-end servers, which may affect the response time in IoT systems. Moreover, no prior work had evaluated the performance of NIST candidates on contemporary processors like GPU and quantum computers. In this study, we showed that with carefully crafted implementation techniques, all the finalist hash function candidates in the NIST standardization competition can achieve high throughput (up-to 1,000 Gbps) on a RTX 3080 GPU. This research output can be used by IoT gateway devices and cloud servers to perform data integrity checks at high speed, thus ensuring a timely response. In addition, this is also the first study that showcase the implementation of NIST lightweight hash functions on a quantum computer (ProjectQ). Besides securing the communication in IoT, these efficient implementations on a GPU and quantum computer can be used to evaluate the strength of respective hash functions against brute-force attack.

Some typical security algorithms such as SHA, MD4, MD5, etc. have been cracked in recent years. However, these algorithms have some shortcomings. Therefore, the traditional one-dimensional-mapping coupled lattice is improved by using the idea of polymorphism in this paper, and a polymorphic mapping–coupled map lattice with information entropy is developed for encrypting color images. Firstly, we extend a diffusion matrix with the original 4 × 4 matrix into an n × n matrix. Then, the Huffman idea is employed to propose a new pixel-level substitution method, which is applied to replace the grey degree value. We employ the idea of polymorphism and select f(x) in the spatiotemporal chaotic system. The pseudo-random sequence is more diversified and the sequence is homogenized. Finally, three plaintext color images of 256 × 256 × 3 , "Lena", "Peppers" and "Mandrill", are selected in order to prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has a large key space, better sensitivity to keys and plaintext images, and a better encryption effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article observes the new hashing algorithm HBC-256. The HBC-256 algorithm is based on the block cipher of the compression function CF (Compression Function) and produces a 256-bits hash value. Like any new cryptographic structure, the HBC-256 algorithm requires careful research process in order to confirm its cryptographic properties, namely: pre-image resistance and resistance to collisions of the first and second order. As a result of the research, for the HBC-256 hashing algorithm differential properties of nonlinear elements (S-boxes) and various options for constructing round characteristics are considered. A hypothesis has been advanced about the existence of paired differences, which will make it possible to construct round characteristics for hashing and for the function of round keys generating. It is shown that even for the most optimal way of constructing chains of differences, the probability of finding correct pairs of texts is less than the probability of a complete enumeration of one 128-bit block of input data, which makes the method of differential cryptanalysis unsuitable for finding collisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet of Things (IoT) security is a fundamental challenge for the enterprises working behind the buildup of the IoT, and it is related applications. In today's ara, with IoT, another buzzword is a blockchain-based cryptocurrency and other blockchain applications. Blockchain technology has proven itself one of the most secure existing technology in trust and privacy. This paper discusses IoT and blockchain technology fundamentals, followed by a discussion regarding numerous consensus models. We also discuss mathematical foundations used by blockchain technology, and it is followed by the proposed privacy-preserving technique for IoT devices with better device identity management using blockchain technology. This paper presents a novel solution for privacy preservation and identity allocation using secure identity management through public key-based cryptography-based blockchain. Though we consider smart home management and smart health management's ecosystem for applicability discussion of the proposed scheme, the proposed system can be applied to any IoT application for better privacy preservation. Finally, we conclude with the discussion regarding the futuristic scope of the proposed system.// [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bloom filters are widely used in genome assembly, IoT applications and several network applications such as symmetric encryption algorithms, and blockchain applications owing to their advantages of fast querying, despite some false positives in querying the input elements. There are many research works carried out to improve both the insertion and querying speed or reduce the false-positive or reduce the storage requirements separately. However, the optimization of all the aforementioned parameters is quite challenging with the existing reported systems. This work proposes to simultaneously improve the insertion and querying speeds by introducing a Cache-efficient One-Hashing Blocked Bloom filter. The proposed method aims to reduce the number of memory accesses required for querying elements into one by splitting the memory into blocks where the block size is equal to the cache line size of the memory. In the proposed filter, each block has further been split into partitions where the size of each partition is the prime number. For insertion and query, one hash value is required, which yields different values when modulo divided with prime numbers. The speed is accelerated using simple hash functions where the hash function is called only once. The proposed method has been implemented and validated using random strings and symmetric K-mer datasets used in the gene assembly. The simulation results show that the proposed filter outperforms the Standard Bloom Filter in terms of the insertion and querying speed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional big data clustering methods for complex attributes have problems of poor clustering results and long clustering running time. Therefore, this paper proposes a nonlinear big data clustering method for complex attributes based on cloud computing. Based on cloud computing environment, the storage framework of big data is constructed to extract the characteristics of information flow model of big database. Multiple regression analysis method is used to obtain the output update rules of big data clustering with nonlinear complex attributes, and achieve balanced configuration of big data transmission channels. Hash function of nonlinear complex attributes is obtained according to p-stable distribution, and hierarchical sampling method is used to achieve big data classification with nonlinear complex attributes. Cloud computing technology is used to complete sample allocation and clustering of nonlinear complex attribute big data. Experiments show that the clustering effect of complex attribute big data proposed in this paper is good, and the clustering running time is significantly shortened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phishing is still a major security threat in cyberspace. In phishing, attackers steal critical information from victims by presenting a spoofing/fake site that appears to be a visual clone of a legitimate site. Several Unicode characters are visually identical to ASCII characters. This similarity in characters is generally known as homoglyphs. Malicious adversaries utilize homoglyphs in URLs and DNS domains to target organizations. To reduce the risks caused by phishing attacks, effective ways of detecting phishing websites are urgently required. This paper proposes a homoglyph attack detection model that combines a hash function and machine learning. There are two phases to the model approach. The machine was being trained during the development phase. The deployment phase involved deploying the model with a Java interface and testing the outcomes through actual user interaction. The results are more accurate when the URL is hashed, as any little changes to the URL can be recognized. The homoglyph detector can be developed as a stand-alone software that is used as the initial step in requesting a webpage as it enhances browser security and protects websites from phishing attempts. To verify the effectiveness, we compared the proposed model on several criteria to existing phishing detection methods. By using the hash function, the proposed security features increase the overall security of the homoglyph attack detection in terms of accuracy, integrity, and availability. The experiment results showed that the model can detect phishing sites with an accuracy of 99.8% using Random Forest, and the hash function improves the accuracy of homoglyph attack detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unprecedented proliferation of smart home together with wireless sensor networks has enriched human’s daily life. Inevitably, the smart home without the guard of authentication mechanism is bound to bring a series of security issues. Hence, a great number of authentication protocols have been designed to verify the user’s identity and ensure that the data be accessed with authorization in smart home. Recently, (M. Shuai et al., 2019) (Computers & Security, 2019) proposed a two-factor anonymous authentication scheme for smart home and presented that their scheme can be immune to various attacks. However, by careful analysis, we found that (M. Shuai et al.’s, 2019) scheme needed further improvements in session key forward secrecy and against: type-I node capture attack and node impersonation attack. As a going step to this direction, here, we first design a robust two-factor user authentication also for smart home based on the elliptic curve cryptography. Second, we give security proofs to demonstrate that the construction of the proposed scheme can be of user anonymity, session key forward secrecy, and resist all attacks shown in this article. Third, performance comparisons covered in storage/network communication/computation costs are carried out to indicate that our scheme can be comparable to those newly designed schemes, especially, the user and gateway in our scheme need only 352 and 320 bits, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Steganography is a technique in which a person hides information in digital media. The message sent by this technique is so secret that other people cannot even imagine the information’s existence. This article entails developing a mechanism for communicating one-on-one with individuals by concealing information from the rest of the group. Based on their availability, digital images are the most suited components for use as transmitters when compared to other objects available on the internet. The proposed technique encrypts a message within an image. There are several steganographic techniques for hiding hidden information in photographs, some of which are more difficult than others, and each has its strengths and weaknesses. The encryption mechanism employed may have different requirements depending on the application. For example, certain applications may require complete invisibility of the key information, while others may require the concealment of a larger secret message. In this research, we proposed a technique that converts plain text to ciphertext and encodes it in a picture using up to the four least significant bit (LSB) based on a hash function. The LSBs of the image pixel values are used to substitute pieces of text. Human eyes cannot predict the variation between the initial Image and the resulting image since only the LSBs are modified. The proposed technique is compared with state-of-the-art techniques. The results reveal that the proposed technique outperforms the existing techniques concerning security and efficiency with adequate MSE and PSNR.

The interest in virtual testing is globally rapidly increasing because of several advantages compared to physical tests in laboratories. In the area of passive car safety, finite element simulations can be used to get further insights, use more biofidelic human models and make the overall assessment more robust by incorporating more variety in the virtual testing load cases. For a successful implementation of virtual testing in regulations or consumer information, the integrity of the procedure has to be ensured. As car simulation models used within the virtual testing are usually not shared with the evaluation institutions due to intellectual property (IP) issues, this is a challenging task. Stringent validation and certification procedures are needed and it has to be ensured that the models used in these steps are the same as the ones used for the virtual testing. In this paper, we developed a secure procedure for model version control. Through analysis of possible threats for both sides, car manufacturer and evaluation institution, we defined requirements, which the new procedure should satisfy. These requirements state that the integrity and authenticity of all shared documents should be protected, as well as the confidentiality of the simulation model. By considering all prerequisites, we developed an architecture for a new procedure. This architecture uses cryptographic algorithms such as hash functions and digital signatures to ensure integrity and authenticity, as well as secure computation mechanisms such as Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX). In our proof-of-concept implementation, we demonstrated how a secure wrapper around LS-DYNA can produce a signed report to authenticate the input model files based on a hash tree and link them to the simulation results. The evaluation institution can use a matching verification tool to verify that the models were not manipulated compared to other simulation runs or the qualification process. The developed procedure can be used for trustworthy implementation of virtual testing into consumer information or regulation for the assessment of car safety with strengthened integrity. Further research is needed to develop comparable procedures for other simulation software packages or ideally integrate it directly into the simulation software.

The purpose of this article is to construct an internal function underlying the “Sponge” scheme for constructing cryptographic hash functions. An internal function in the “Sponge” scheme is a fixed-length transformation or permutation that operates on a fixed number of bits that make up the internal state of the function. There are various constructive approaches to functiondesign. The most common approach is to use a permutation based on a symmetric block encryption algorithm with constants as the key. This article builds an internal function using the generalized AES design methodology. This methodology makes it easy to design block ciphers to encrypt large blocks of plaintext with small components, representing the processed data as multidimensional arrays. The internal function is a block cipher that processes 2048 bits, represented as a 9-dimensional array of 512 4-bit elements with size 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2. Each round of encryption consists of three transformations (S-blocks, linear transformation, and permutation), similar to the three round transformations of AES SubBytes, MixColumns, and ShiftRows. The constructed function can be used as an internal function in the modified “Sponge” schemefor constructing cryptographic hash functions.

• A framework for considering the heterogeneity within land parcels is proposed. • Using hash functions to handle the heterogeneity of driving factors within parcels. • Using GAT to build different neighborhood and obtain interaction relationships. • Different hash functions and neighborhood have a significant impact on the results. Vector cellular automata (VCA) models, which excel at representing spatiotemporal dynamics of irregularly shaped land parcels, have been widely employed in land use change simulations. However, current research faces the following issues: (1) most VCA models neglect the spatial heterogeneity of driving factors within each land parcel when evaluating the environmental driving effects; (2) when calculating the neighborhood effects, simple statistics of land use types in neighboring parcels are often used, overlooking the influence of driving factors within neighboring parcels; (3) the ability to explore the interactions between land parcels is often limited. To address the aforementioned issues, this study proposes a HashGAT-VCA model for investigating urban land use changes. The model utilizes a Hash function to encode the non-uniform distribution of each driving factor within each irregularly shaped land parcel into a fixed-length vector, and constructs a graph structure between land parcels based on their spatial topological relationships. By employing a Graph Attention Network (GAT), the model explores the mechanisms of environmental driving effects and inter-parcel interactions to calculate the probability of land use change for each parcel. The proposed HashGAT-VCA model was applied to simulate urban land use changes in Shenzhen, China, from 2009 to 2012. Compared to other VCA models, the HashGAT-VCA demonstrated higher simulation accuracy. The results indicated that HashGAT-VCA can effectively capture the impacts of the heterogeneously distributed driving factors and the interactions between land parcels on land use changes. Additionally, this study simulated land use patterns for the years 2025 and 2030 under ecological control strategies, providing decision support for urban planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, there has been a growing demand for image encryption techniques that offer robust protection and minimize processing time. The proposed paper proposes an efficient color image encryption system that excels in speed and security. The encryption system comprises three fundamental phases. The initial phase generates a unique encryption key by combining user-defined input with the original image and applying various operations and hash functions. In the confusion phase, the image is divided into blocks, forming a Binary Tree (BT) using primary color blocks, ensuring that the root and leaves belong to different colors. The confused matrix is derived through an inorder traversal that ensures non-adjacency of pixels of the same color, introducing an added layer of security. Finally, each pixel is scrambled by applying BT to its binary form to add more security and complexity. A DNA sequence is generated, and operations are executed based on two different chaotic maps, enhancing unpredictability and attack resistance. Extensive testing has validated the effectiveness of the proposed system, revealing a remarkable 28–45% reduction in processing time compared to recent techniques. Moreover, the system successfully withstands various attacks, as demonstrated through rigorous evaluations, including high-performance, visual perception, and cryptosystem strength evaluations. These results underscore the practical applicability and robust security offered by our efficient color image encryption solution, which provides a practical solution for applications prioritizing efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]