Multi-phase digital authentication of e-certificate with secure concealment of multiple secret copyright signatures

Abstract

The work suggests a unique data security protocol for trusted online validation of e-documents like university certificates to confirm its credibility on different aspects. The idea reliably validates such e-documents from both the issuing authority and incumbent perspectives by strongly complying the security challenges like authentication, confidentiality, integrity and non-repudiations. At the very beginning, the parent institute physically issues the client copyright signature to the incumbent and stores this signature and biometric fingerprint of the incumbent on the server database. Additionally, the server secretly fabricates ownership signatures of parent institute and concern officer both within the e-document and this certified e-document is kept on the server database. Importantly, these signature fabrications are governed by self-defined hash computations on incumbent registration and certificate number respectively. Next, the server transmits this signed e-document to the client after a successful login by the client. Now client conceals shared copyright signature and taken thumb impression of the incumbent separately within this received e-document. Critically, these client-side signature castings are employed through self-defined hash computations on the incumbent name and obtained marks respectively. Finally, this authenticated e-document is validated at the server end by sensing all authentic signatures from it through those same identical hash operations. For stronger authenticity each signature is concealed by tracing its valid or authentic circular orientation of fragment sequences and embedding locations both derived from respective hash operations. Also, each signature is dispersed in non-overlapping manners on each separate region of the e-document promoting better signature recovery. Additional robustness is further injected with variable encoding of signature bits on different transformed pixel byte components of the e-Certificate image. Overall, the scheme confirms significant performance enhancements over exiting approaches with exhaustive simulation results on image data hiding aspects and their standardized comparisons.