Hassan Noura

An integrated multimedia data reduction and content confidentiality approach for limited networked devices

In this paper, we specifically address the problem of securing distributed multimedia systems, based on networked tiny devices (i.e., Internet of Things). Such systems have usually to deal with three antagonistic constraints: (a) the hardware limitations of the devices in terms of computational power, memory storage and energy provision as they are driven by batteries, (b) the intrinsic voluminous and time sensitive nature of the captured multimedia data, and (c) their relative vulnerability to attacks since they are open platforms communicating through unreliable wireless radio communications. We propose and study a novel integrated approach, specifically tailored to significantly reduce the size of the transmitted multimedia data whilst ensuring its content confidentiality. In opposition to traditional approaches, based on cryptographic systems which inquire a huge overhead when applied to multimedia data, our approach makes use of Voronoi tessellation to transform the input data. This transformation, performed on a random fashion basis, allows both significant data reduction and content confidentiality as well, while it exhibits a very low complexity. We performed an in-depth security analysis of our proposal that reveals its robustness against all known types of attacks. Moreover, we conducted an extensive series of simulations, based on realistic settings, to show the effectiveness of our approach over state-of-the-art approaches, in the context of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) applications.

Key dependent cipher scheme for sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are a promising future for many commercial and military applications. WSN is vulnerable to a variety of potential attacks (active and passive). The confidentiality of WSN is an essential service and becoming a major concern for security WSN protocol designers. However, the characteristics of WSN (limitations of power, computation and memory) impose security challenges, since the conventional ciphers suffer from these limitations. In this paper, a new different cipher technique is defined to ensure the data confidentiality with a significant reduction of computational complexity, energy cost, and communication overhead. The proposed cipher is applied on a set of packets called generation. The strength of the proposed cipher against attacks is based on its dynamic property. The basic scheme was tested and evaluated by comparing it with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm, which is considered as a reliable and robust cipher algorithm. Theoretical and simulation results of the proposed cipher scheme show that it is immune against linear, differential, chosen/known-plain-text, brute force, and statistical attacks.

One round cipher algorithm for multimedia IoT devices

With the exponential growth in Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, security and privacy issues have emerged as critical challenges that can potentially compromise their successful deployment in many data-sensitive applications. Hence, there is a pressing need to address these challenges, given that IoT systems suffer from different limitations, and IoT devices are constrained in terms of energy and computational power, which renders them extremely vulnerable to attacks. Traditional cryptographic algorithms use a static structure that requires several rounds of computations, which leads to significant overhead in terms of execution time and computational resources. Moreover, the problem is compounded when dealing with multimedia contents, since the associated algorithms have stringent QoS requirements. In this paper, we propose a lightweight cipher algorithm based on a dynamic structure with a single round that consists of simple operations, and that targets multimedia IoT. In this algorithm, a dynamic key is generated and then used to build two robust substitution tables, a dynamic permutation table, and two pseudo-random matrices. This dynamic cipher structure minimizes the number of rounds to a single one, while maintaining a high level of randomness and security. Moreover, the proposed cipher scheme is flexible as the dimensions of the input matrix can be selected to match the devices’ memory capacity. Extensive security tests demonstrated the robustness of the cipher against various kinds of attacks. The speed, simplicity and high-security level, in addition to low error propagation, make of this approach a good encryption candidate for multimedia IoT devices.

A new efficient lightweight and secure image cipher scheme

The protection of multimedia content has become a key area of research, since very often a user’s privacy and confidentiality can be at risk. Although a large number of image encryption algorithms have recently emerged, only a subset of these algorithms are suitable for real applications. These algorithms however use non-integer operations such as chaotic solutions that introduce a sizeable overhead in terms of latency and resources, in addition to floating-point hardware that is costly to implement. Designing an efficient, lightweight, and secure image encryption algorithm is still a hard challenge; yet, it is crucial to have in order to meet the demands of recent multimedia applications running on energy-limited devices. In this paper, an efficient image encryption scheme based on a dynamic structure is proposed. The structure of the proposed cipher consists of two different lightweight rounds (forward and backward chaining blocks) and a block permutation process. In addition, a key derivation function is proposed to produce a dynamic key based on a secret key and a nonce. This key, according to its configuration, can be changed for each validate time (session) or for each new input image. Then, based on this key, the cipher layers are produced, which are an integer or a binary diffusion matrix and a substitution table S-box, together with a permutation table P-box. The proposed dynamic cipher is designed to provide high robustness against contemporary powerful attacks, and permits reducing the required number of rounds for achieving the lightweight property. Experimental simulations demonstrate the efficiency and robustness levels of the proposed scheme.

A dynamic approach for a lightweight and secure cipher for medical images

Protecting the contents of medical records is of paramount importance when it comes to preserving patients’ privacy. Most existing cryptographic-based solutions rely on traditional encryption algorithms having a multi-round structure, which introduces processing latency and requires increased resources. Medical images possess special characteristics compared to other types of images. The main goal of this paper is to leverage these characteristics to design and implement an efficient and secure encryption algorithm for such images. The proposed solution defines three variants of encryption algorithms: (a) full, (b) middle-full, and (c) selective. The full approach encrypts all sub-matrices of an image, while the middle-full variant is a middle solution between the selective and full algorithms and its goal is to just hide the type of the medical image. Selective encryption identifies a set of sub-matrices of an image according to a statistical average test, known as region of interest (ROI). In the three approaches, a high security level is ensured since each image is encrypted independently of the previous and next images. Also, all primitives of the proposed cipher, such as permutation and substitution, depend on a dynamic key. Furthermore, the encryption scheme is efficient since the proposed round function is lightweight and applied for only one round. This reduces the latency and the required resources as compared to traditional cryptographic schemes. The proposed approach is flexible as it can be applied in either selective, middle-full, or full mode. Also, the size of a sub-matrix is variable and can be changed according to the available memory size. Several security and performance tests are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solution. The results validate the robustness of the proposed scheme against almost all considered types of attacks and show an improvement in terms of latency and resources compared to current image-encryption schemes. Also, the results confirm the robustness of the proposed algorithm in protecting the contents of medical images.

Efficient and Secure Visual Data Transmission Approach for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) have to deal with two main opposite constraints: (a) the voluminous nature of the sensed data, almost of megabytes order on one hand and (b) the limited resources, characterizing specifically WMSNs platforms (limited energy provision and CPU power, wireless communications, etc.) on the other hand. Additionally, as these platforms are open infrastructures, they are hence vulnerable to several types of attacks. In this paper, we propose a new and novel approach, specifically tailored to significantly reduce the transmitted multimedia data whilst allowing a high level of security, in particular data confidentiality. In fact, rather than using traditional cryptography systems which applied on multimedia data, inquiring a huge communication and hence overhead hence are not suitable within WMSNs, our approach begins first by transforming the input images using Voronoi tessellation, that reduces significantly their volume while preserving at the same time their perceived quality. As this transformation is performed on a random fashion basis, this randomness ensures then the content confidentiality. The proposed approach achieves hence both: (a) reducing noticeably the amount of the data sent by the source nodes, prolonging hence the overall network lifetime and (b) makes the network more robust against attacks. We study the parameters for setting up our approach by incorporating two schemes (basic one and more elaborated one). Finally, we demonstrate, through extensive experiments, the robustness (i.e., secure against several types of attacks) and the effectiveness of our approaches over the current state-of-the-art techniques.

A New Efficient Secure Coding Scheme for Random Linear Network Coding

Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) is a promising technology of Network coding (NC) {that is} verified to be both sufficient and efficient. In this paper, we propose an efficient implementation of coding process, ensuring the security against active and passive attacks, in order to deploy RLNC in real networks, especially on battery constrained mobile devices with low computation capabilities such as mobile phones or sensors. We first present our flexible secure solution that can achieve simultaneously the information confidentiality, the packet integrity and the source authentication. It contains a new scheme of generation of invertible key dependent binary Global Encoding Matrix (GEM) with a complexity, a memory consumption and a decoding delay lower than the traditional

Securing JPEG-2000 images in constrained environments: a dynamic approach

RLNC

An Efficient Secure Storage Scheme Based on Information Fragmentation

. The effectiveness of coding process is proved by modifying the Galois field of calculation from integer (int8, int16) to binary in order to ensure low computational requirements that lead to high throughput and low energy consumption. Furthermore, theoretical and numerical results reveal that the proposed methods give an effectiveness of coding and a higher level of security compared to many recent works in this field.

Efficient and Secure Physical Encryption Scheme for Low-Power Wireless M2M Devices

This paper presents an efficient and lightweight format-compliant selective encryption algorithm for secure JPEG 2000 coding. The proposed encryption scheme is dynamic in nature, where the key is changed for every input image. Furthermore, an amount of 4% of bytes from each packet data is selected to follow the encryption process. Moreover, to achieve the desired security, two rounds of substitution–diffusion processes are applied to the selected bytes. Experimental analysis has proved that this amount of encrypted data ensures a hard image distortion, while significantly preserve the communication bandwidth. In addition, compression analysis and extensive security tests have demonstrated: (1) the robustness of the proposed selective encryption approach against the most known types of attacks, (2) the preservation of the main compression properties (i.e., compression friendliness and format-compliant), and most importantly, and (3) the efficiency in term of execution time compared to others similar JPEG-2000 images encryption schemes.