Advanced Techniques in Watermarking, Encryption and Steganography for Secure Communication

Dear Colleagues,

In today’s interconnected world, the exponential growth of digital data and the widespread use of communication networks have significantly increased the risks of data breaches, identity theft, and unauthorized access. With the rise in emerging technologies such as 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI), the need for robust and reliable security mechanisms has become more urgent than ever. Traditional cryptographic methods alone are no longer sufficient to combat increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. Thus, integrating watermarking, encryption, and steganography offers a multi-layered defense strategy, ensuring both data confidentiality and integrity. Watermarking provides content authentication, copyright protection, and tamper detection by embedding hidden information into multimedia data. Encryption ensures data confidentiality by converting plaintext into ciphertext, making it unintelligible to unauthorized users. Steganography, on the other hand, conceals data within innocuous carriers, adding an extra layer of secrecy. The combination of these techniques creates highly resilient security frameworks capable of withstanding modern threats such as deepfake manipulations, information forgery, and AI-based attacks.

This Special Issue aims to explore innovative techniques, algorithms, and real-world applications that leverage watermarking, encryption, and steganography for secure communication. The objective is to foster the exchange of novel ideas, experimental results, and interdisciplinary research that push the boundaries of secure data transmission, storage, and authentication.

We invite submissions on a wide range of topics, including but not limited to:

Watermarking Techniques:

• Robust and imperceptible watermarking algorithms for digital images, videos, and audio.
• Fragile and semi-fragile watermarking for content authentication and tamper detection.
• Reversible and zero-watermarking schemes for sensitive data protection.
• AI and deep learning-based watermarking techniques.

Encryption Methods:

• Novel cryptographic algorithms and key management strategies.
• Chaos-based, lightweight, and post-quantum encryption methods.
• Homomorphic encryption for privacy-preserving computations.
• Hybrid cryptosystems combining encryption with steganography or watermarking.

Steganography and Steganalysis:

• Adaptive and dynamic steganographic embedding techniques.
• Robust steganalysis methods for detecting hidden information.
• Generative adversarial network (GAN)-based steganography and its countermeasures.

Multimodal and Hybrid Security Solutions:

• Combined watermarking, encryption, and steganography approaches for enhanced security.
• Blockchain and distributed ledger-based security mechanisms.
• AI and machine learning-powered attack detection and prevention systems.

Applications in Secure Communication:

• Secure multimedia distribution and copyright protection.
• Privacy-preserving medical image transmission.
• Secure financial transactions and e-commerce data protection.
• Secure communication protocols for IoT, 5G, and wireless sensor networks.

By addressing these areas, this Special Issue aims to advance the state of the art in secure communication and promote the development of more resilient and scalable security solutions in the face of evolving threats.

Dr. Suo Gao
Dr. Rui Wu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Cryptography is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• watermarking
• encryption
• steganography
• security and privacy