Enhancing Security in Cryptographic Smart Cards through Elliptic Curve Cryptography and Optimized Modified Matrix Encoding Algorithms

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 hackers, users and organizations adapt to longer passwords or to change their passwords frequently. But the risk of having longer passwords or changing passwords frequently is that the passwords could be easily forgotten. Researchers have got this into their main concern and have worked on improving the security of these Cryptographic smart cards. They have employed several cryptographic techniques to embed the card holder details and the password into the smart card. However, those methods invented to improve the smart card security are not up to the requirements. In this work, we have designed a secure technique by integrating both Cryptography and Steganography which can be used for Smart Card Security. Initially, user’s confidential details are encrypted using the most secure Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) technique and then the encrypted cipher is embedded into the users 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 stegoimage, an Optimization algorithm, Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) technique is used to select the image pixels where the secret data should be embedded. On the other end, the secret data embedded into users’ image is extracted and it is de-ciphered. If the match occurs, 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 and the modified matrix encoding using ABC algorithm embeds more number of message bits and simultaneously reduces distortion in stego image.