A Novel Protocol-Free Bandage-Cover Cryptographer

IEEE Trans Cybern. 2022 Nov;52(11):11431-11441. doi: 10.1109/TCYB.2021.3117235. Epub 2022 Oct 17.

Abstract

Cyber security has become an important problem nowadays as almost everyone is often linked to the Internet for business and entertainment. Conventional cryptographers fail to address timely issues regarding cyber-attacks, such as cyber identity theft. In this work, we propose a novel idea, namely, a bandage-cover cryptographer (BCC), which is completely software-defined and protocol-free. Besides, this new cryptographic approach can enable camouflages to confuse data-mining robots, which are often encountered in the cyber world nowadays. Because all of the existing cryptographers aim to protect the entire data (document and file) altogether, they cannot have camouflagibility to mislead data-mining robots. Conversely, by our proposed novel BCC, one can select arbitrary contexts or parts of the data (related to individual identify and/or private confidential information) under protection. To evaluate such a first-ever cryptographer capable of misleading data-mining robots, we define two new metrics, namely: 1) vulnerability and 2) camouflage rates. The theoretical analyses of vulnerability rate and camouflage rate for our proposed new BCC are also presented in this article to demonstrate the corresponding effectiveness.