Noura Ahmed Mawla
@ruc.edu.iq
Computer Science
AL-Rafidain University College
RESEARCH, TEACHING, or OTHER INTERESTS
Computer Science, Software
Scopus Publications
Scholar Citations
Scholar h-index
Scholar i10-index
Scopus Publications
Noura A. Mawla and Hussein K. Khafaji
MDPI AG
Nowadays, with the increase in cyber-attacks, hacking, and data theft, maintaining data security and confidentiality is of paramount importance. Several techniques are used in cryptography and steganography to ensure their safety during the transfer of information between the two parties without interference from an unauthorized third party. This paper proposes a modern approach to cryptography and steganography based on exploiting a new environment: bases and protein chains used to encrypt and hide sensitive data. The protein bases are used to form a cipher key whose length is twice the length of the data to be encrypted. During the encryption process, the plain data and the cipher key are represented in several forms, including hexadecimal and binary representation, and several arithmetic operations are performed on them, in addition to the use of logic gates in the encryption process to increase encrypted data randomness. As for the protein chains, they are used as a cover to hide the encrypted data. The process of hiding inside the protein bases will be performed in a sophisticated manner that is undetectable by statistical analysis methods, where each byte will be fragmented into three groups of bits in a special order, and each group will be included in one specific protein base that will be allocated to this group only, depending on the classifications of bits that have been previously stored in special databases. Each byte of the encrypted data will be hidden in three protein bases, and these protein bases will be distributed randomly over the protein chain, depending on an equation designed for this purpose. The advantages of these proposed algorithms are that they are fast in encrypting and hiding data, scalable, i.e., insensitive to the size of plain data, and lossless algorithms. The experiments showed that the proposed cryptography algorithm outperforms the most recent algorithms in terms of entropy and correlation values that reach −0.6778 and 7.99941, and the proposed steganography algorithm has the highest payload of 2.666 among five well-known hiding algorithms that used DNA sequences as the cover of the data.
Noura A. Mawla and Hussein K. Khafaji
IEEE
Drones and the Internet of Things (IoT) have become of paramount importance to individuals, entities, organizations, and states due to the benefits they provide in daily life. Most of the consumer devices around us have become connected to the Internet, no matter how small they are, including smart home applications, automatic sensors, portable medical devices, implants inside the human body, etc. The connection of these devices to the Internet has opened the way for many intrusions, either to steal data or cause harm to humans. This research suggests a method to protect this data from being exposed to security breaches by proposing a new lightweight encryption algorithm. The proposed algorithm presents new ways to encrypt data by exploiting the different faces of the characters in ASCII code, where the text is converted into four different forms, including binary, hexadecimal, characters, and digits. Each of these forms undergoes a certain process, either summation or subtracting, or passing it through the logic gates to obtain high encoding confidentiality to give more complexities to increase data security. Experimental results of the proposed algorithm show a significant improvement in coding rate with high encryption and decryption speeds, in addition to the correlation coefficient and entropy reaching -0.4735 and 7.9983, respectively.
Noura A. Mawla and Hussein K. Khafaji
Hindawi Limited
The arms of the Internet octopus have reached the ends of the planet. As it has become indispensable in our daily lives, huge amounts of information are transmitted through this network, and it is growing momentarily, which has led to an increase in the number of attacks on this information. Keeping the security of this information has become a necessity today. Therefore, the scientists of cryptography and steganography have seen a great and rapid development in the previous years to the present day, where various security and protection techniques have been used in these two technologies. In this research, it was emphasized to secure the confidentiality and security of the transmitted data between the sending and receiving parties by using both techniques of encryption and steganography. In contrast, where genetic algorithms and logic gates are exploited in an encryption process, in an unprecedented approach, protein motifs are used to mask the encoded message, gaining more dispersion because there are 20 bases used to represent the protein. The real payload gained ranges between 0.8 and 2.666, which outperforms the algorithms that depend on DNA sequences.