Enhancing the privacy of web-based communication

Reviewer: Zakaria Saleh

Stealth encryption, a new encryption scheme that should protect users from profiling attacks by concealing the semantic content of plaintext, while preserving its grammatical structure and other nonsemantic linguistic features, is proposed in this paper. This encryption scheme produces ciphertext that cannot efficiently be distinguished from normal English text; every word of English plaintext is replaced with a word of ciphertext drawn from an English dictionary. The techniques apply to other languages as well. The paper provides an example of an encrypted message, and then explains the process of the encryption. Compared to other lexical steganography methods, such as mimic functions, stealth encryption does not require any key exchange. The authors also state that stealth encryption is much more efficient, explaining that the ciphertext generated by stealth encryption is about the same size as the original text, where the average size of the ciphertext generated by nicetext is 30 times the size of the original text. The paper is intended to introduce a new protocol for encryption. However, without providing more details, it is hard to evaluate or express a professional opinion. Looking at the data provided to illustrate the test results of the proposed encryption scheme, I find this work to be of great significance; it should contribute to enhancing the privacy of Web-based communication with greater efficiency. Online Computing Reviews Service