Advanced Cryptographic Techniques for Digital Watermarking, Encryption, and Steganography

Dear Colleagues,

With the rapid growth of digital media, cloud computing, and intelligent communication systems, the secure transmission, storage, and copyright protection of digital information have become increasingly critical. Cryptographic techniques, including digital watermarking, encryption, and steganography, play a fundamental role in safeguarding data confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity in modern information systems. Beyond algorithmic security, these techniques must also address system-level challenges, such as implementation feasibility, computational efficiency, scalability, and real-world deployment in complex multimedia environments.

This Special Issue aims to provide a comprehensive platform for presenting recent advances in cryptography and information hiding technologies, covering both theoretical developments and system-oriented solutions. It focuses on the design, analysis, and implementation of watermarking, encryption, and steganography methods, particularly in the context of multimedia security. Emphasis is placed on efficient system design, prototype development, performance evaluation, and robustness assessment, as well as resistance against emerging attack models under practical constraints.

Example research areas include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. System-oriented digital watermarking for copyright protection and content authentication;
2. Efficient multimedia encryption with real-time processing and cloud/edge deployment;
3. Practical steganography methods with embedding/extraction and robustness evaluation;
4. Chaos-based cryptography and information hiding with implementation feasibility and benchmarking;
5. Machine learning and intelligent security approaches with system integration and adversarial robustness;
6. Prototype development and experimental evaluation using real-world multimedia datasets;
7. Lightweight, scalable cryptographic solutions for IoT, mobile, and embedded devices;
8. Security analysis and attack modeling under real-world system constraints;
9. Joint optimization of security, robustness, and system efficiency in watermarking, encryption, and steganography;
10. Integration of cryptographic and information hiding techniques into cloud, edge, and distributed multimedia systems.

The Special Issue welcomes high-quality original research and review articles that explore innovative cryptographic frameworks, chaos-based and intelligent security mechanisms, and cross-disciplinary approaches integrating signal processing, machine learning, and nonlinear dynamics. Contributions that demonstrate practical deployment, prototype-based validation, experimental benchmarking, or system-level integration are especially encouraged. By bringing together researchers from academia and industry, this Special Issue seeks to promote the development of efficient, implementable, and secure technologies for protecting digital information in dynamic and heterogeneous environments.

Dr. Suo Gao
Dr. Aditya Kumar Sahu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• digital watermarking
• cryptography
• information hiding
• steganography
• multimedia security
• image and video encryption
• chaos-based security
• robustness and attack analysis
• secure data transmission
• intelligent security systems