ENHANCING SECURITY IN CRYPTOGRAPHIC SMART CARDS THROUGH ELLIPTIC CURVE CRYPTOGRAPHY AND OPTIMIZED MODIFIED MATRIX ENCODING ALGORITHMS
G. Prakash, M. Kannan · Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology · 2013
Now-a-days Cryptographic smart cards are being used for most of the online transactions in many fields . But the security and the privacy of usage of these smart cards have been threatened by various attacks to hack the passwords of the smart card users. Since, small length passwords are easily accessible to hac kers, users and organizations adapt to longer passwords o r to change their passwords frequently. But the ris k of having longer passwords or changing passwords frequently is that the passwords could be easily forgott en. Researchers have got this into their main concern a nd have worked on improving the security of these Cryptographic smart cards. They have employed several cryptographic techniques to embed the card holde r details and the password into the smart card. Howev er, those methods invented to improve the smart car d security are not up to the requirements. In this wo rk, we have designed a secure technique by integrat ing both Cryptography and Steganography which can be used for Smart Card Security. Initially, user’s confidential details are encrypted using the most s ecure Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) technique and then the encrypted cipher is embedded into the user s photographic image using a novel proposed steganographic technique named Optimized Modified Matrix Encoding (OMME) algorithm. While embedding the encrypted user details into the image of the user, in order to reduce distortion of steg oimage, an Optimization algorithm, Artificial Bee Co lony (ABC) technique is used to select the image pi xels where the secret data should be embedded. On the ot her end, the secret data embedded into users’ image is extracted and it is de-ciphered. If the match occur s, then user will be authenticated. This proposed technique increases the level of security and thus it can be used for the security of smartcards when compared to existing methodologies, since ECC is more secure than any other cryptographic algorithm an d the modified matrix encoding using ABC algorithm embeds more number of message bits and simultaneously reduces distortion in stego image.