Preface

In an age of explosive worldwide growth of electronic data storage and communications, effective protection of information has become a critical requirement. Especially when used in coordination with other tools for information security, cryptography in all of its applications, including data confidentiality, data integrity, and user authentication, is the most powerful tool for protecting information. While the importance of cryptographic technique (i.e., encryption) in protecting sensitive and critical information and resources cannot be overemphasized, an examination of technical evolution within several industries reveals an approaching precipice of scientific change. The glacially paced but inevitable convergence of quantum mechanics, nanotechnology, computer science, and applied mathematics will revolutionize modern technology. The implications of such changes will be far reaching, with one of its greatest impacts affecting information security. More specifically, that of modern cryptography.

With the exponential growth of wireless communications, the Internet of Things, and Cloud Computing, along with the increasingly dominant roles played by electronic commerce in every major industry, safeguarding the information in storage and the information travelling over communication networks is a critical challenge for technology innovators. The key prerequisite for the sustained development and successful exploitation of information technology and other related industries is the notion of information security and assurance that includes operations for protecting information systems by ensuring their availability, integrity, authentication, non-repudiation, information confidentiality, and privacy.

While it is true that cryptography has failed to provide its users the real security it promised, the reasons for its failure do not have much to do with cryptography as a mathematical science. Rather, poor implementation of protocols and algorithms has been the major source of the problem. Cryptography will continue to play lead roles in developing new security solutions that will be in great demand with the increasing bandwidth and data rate of next-generation communication systems and networks. New cryptographic algorithms, protocols, and tools must follow up in order to adapt to the new communication and computing technologies. Computing systems and communication protocols, like IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15, have become targets of attacks because their underlying radio communication medium contains security loopholes. New security mechanisms should be designed to defend against the increasingly complex and sophisticated attacks launched on networks and web-based applications. In addition to classical cryptographic algorithms, approaches like chaos-based cryptography, DNA-based cryptography, and quantum cryptography will increasingly play important roles.

However, one must not forget that the fundamental problems in security are not new. What has changed over the decades, however, is the exponential growth in the number of connected devices, evolution of networks with data communication speeds as high as terabits/second, massive increase in the volume of data communication, availability of high-performance hardware, and massively

**II**

**Chapter 8 119**

**Chapter 9 141**

High-Speed Area-Efficient Implementation of AES Algorithm

*by Roshan Chitrakar, Roshan Bhusal and Prajwol Maharjan*

on Reconfigurable Platform

*by Altaf O. Mulani and Pradeep B. Mane*

Hybrid Approaches to Block Cipher

parallel architecture for computing and intelligent software. As security systems design becomes more and more complex to meet these challenges, a common mistake made most often by security specialists is not comprehensively analyzing the system to be secured before making a choice about which security mechanism to deploy. On many occasions, the security mechanism chosen turns out to be either incompatible with or inadequate for handling the complexities of the system. This, however, does not vitiate the ideas, algorithms, and protocols of the security mechanisms. While the same old security mechanism, even with appropriate extensions and enhancements, may not be strong enough to secure the multiplicity of complex systems today, the underlying principles will continue to work on the next-generation systems, and indeed, for next era of computing and communications.
