ABSTRACT
Data are the new oil in today’s age. Data and information are extremely important in our day-to-day lives in one way or another. Ranging from finding the nearest hospital to finding one’s favorite fast-food joint, data are everywhere. The exact location of one’s workplace, the distance from home, and the time it will take to reach there: everything depends on the availability of data. With the emergence of large amounts of data, concerns about its security have arisen. There are various algorithms and mechanisms for providing security to the data flowing across public networks, the most common of which is the internet, but we can surely say that security on the internet is not at all robust. Can the existing algorithms be the method of choice? That is a question we need to answer. The existing algorithms are hailed as being sufficient to sustain a barrage of attacks, but whether they stand a chance against AI-based cryptanalysis would be a tough question to answer. Continuous ongoing research on quantum computers and their increasing performance is constantly threatening the existing symmetric cryptosystems. There is also a constant threat from an indirect attack on the existing cryptographic systems, called the side channel attack, or from power analysis attacks, which attack the implementation of the algorithm rather than going for the algorithm itself. It was proven to crack the RSA 4096 algorithm completely in 2013. In this chapter, we will discuss some of the existing techniques of information security and also discuss the various ways in which these ciphers have been cracked or can be cracked in the foreseeable future. Toward this end, the various intelligent systems based new age cryptographic alternatives will also be discussed, as will a possible replacement for the existing algorithms. We are also going to briefly touch on how intelligent systems based on deep learning could complement the existing cryptographic and steganographic techniques by providing better security and robustness against attacks.
