Julio Cesar Hernandez-Castro

 

 

Senior Lecturer

My research interests range from Cryptology to Steganography & Steganalysis, including Computer & Network Security, Computer Forensics, CAPTCHAs, RFID Security, the application of Non-Standard techniques to Cryptology, the study of hard (NP and above) Problems and Quantum Information Processing.

 For a more or less up to date list of publications, check my DBLP entry or try this query on Google Scholar.

 Even better, you can visit my Scholar author profile.

 Additionally, you can also look at all my relevant research data, as computed by Publish or Perish.

 My Erdos number is 3, with the path  Quisquater - Odlyzko - Erdos.

 Below is a very short list with a selection of some of my publications:

• A Framework for Avoiding Steganography Usage Over HTTP. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, v. 35 pp. 491-501, 2012. [PDF]
  

• On the Strength of Egglue and Other Logic CAPTCHAs. SECRYPT 2011 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Security and Cryptography, Seville, Spain, 18-21 July 2011 [PDF]
  

• Cryptanalysis of an EPC Class-1 Generation-2 standard compliant authentication protocol. Engineering Applications of Artificial Inteligence, v.24, n.6, pp.1061-1069, 2011 [PDF]

• Quasi-Linear Cryptanalysis of a Secure RFID Ultralightweight Authentication Protocol. Inscrypt 2010, Shanghai, China, October 20-24, 2010, pp. 427-442. LNCS v. 6584 Springer 2011 [PDF]

• Cryptanalysis of the David-Prasad RFID Ultralightweight Authentication Protocol. RFIDSec 2010, Istanbul, Turkey, June 8-9, 2010, LNCS v. 6370, pp.22-34, 2010 [PDF]
  

• Cryptanalysis of the SASI Ultralightweight RFID Authentication Protocol with Modular Rotations. Preliminary version published at the online repository arXiv CoRR abs/0811.4257: (2008) and extended version accepted at WCC 2009 [PDF]

• An Ultra Light Authentication Protocol Resistant to Passive Attacks under the Gen-2 Specification. J. Inf. Sci. Eng. 25(1): 33-57 (2009) [PDF]
  

• LAMED — A PRNG for EPC Class-1 Generation-2 RFID specification. Computer Standards and Interfaces, v. 31, 1, pp. 88-97, 2009 [PDF]

• Steganalysis of Hydan. 4th IFIP TC 11 International Information Security Conference, SEC 2009, pp.132-142 [PDF][slides]

• On the Salsa20 Core Function. Proceedings of the FSE Workshop 2008: pp. 462-469 [PDF]

• Non-standard Attacks against Cryptographic Protocols, with an Example over a Simplified Mutual Authentication Protocol. Proceedings of the MCO Conference 2008: pp. 589-596 [PDF]
  

• Advances in Ultralightweight Cryptography for Low-Cost RFID Tags: Gossamer Protocol. WISA 2008: pp. 56-68 [PDF]

• On the Distinguishability of Distance-Bounded Permutations in Ordered Channels. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 3(2): 166-172 (2008) [PDF]
  

• Automated Design of Cryptographic Hash Schemes by Evolving Highly-Nonlinear Functions. J. Inf. Sci. Eng. 24(5): 1485-1504 (2008) [PDF]

• Automated design of a lightweight block cipher with Genetic Programming. KES Journal 12(1): 3-14 (2008) [PDF]

• CSteg: Talking in C Code - Steganography of C Source Code in Text. SECRYPT 2008, pp. 399-406 [PDF] [slides]
  

• Steganography in games: A general methodology and its application to the game of Go. Computers & Security, v.25, pp. 64-71, 2006 [PDF]

• Wheedham: An Automatically Designed Block Cipher by means of Genetic Programming. Proceedings of the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, pp.192-199, Canada, 2006 [PDF]
  

• Dr. Pedro Peris Lopez (RFID Security, Lightweight Cryptography)
• Jorge Blasco Alis (Steganography & Steganalysis with Data Leakage Prevention)
  
• Mohamed Merhi (RFID Security)
• Kathy Carstens (Smartphone Security)

 
 I am open to almost any interesting subject that might fall within my research interests described above, specially:

• CAPTCHAs
• Breaking existing CAPTCHAs, text, image, and audio-based
• I've some ideas against existing supposedly secure schemes
• Proposing new schemes
• New paradigms, with better security reductions to hard AI problems
• Improving existing schemes
• Minor and major modifications, or the (Im)possibility of making some proposals secure enough
• Steganalysis and Watermarking
• Steganalysis of well-known steganographic tools
• Detecting various types of steganographic contents on the Web
• Steganography in unconventional media
• Such as games (Go, Chess, other online games, etc.)
• Computer Forensics
• I am particularly interested in Anti Forensics techniques
• Network Forensics
• Malware analysis (an authorship)
• Heuristics and Natured inspired algorithms applied to Cryptography and Cryptanalysis
• Design and analysis of Boolean functions
• Design of new crypto primitives
• RFID Security
• Design and analysis of lightweight primitives and protocols
• Lightweight Cryptography and Cryptanalysis
• Studying the AES (Key Expansion, notably)
• Studying the PRESENT lightweight block cipher (and his little S-box too!)
• Studying the SQUASH one-way function by Shamir
• Not interest in classical hash functions right now. All the rest of cryptographers in the world will spend the next 4 years in hash function design and analysis, so there will be many orphaned fields to explore! :-)
• On the other hand, quite interested in lightweight hash functions
  

 I have recently been an Examiner of the following Ph.D. Thesis:

• Cesar Estebanez Tascon. Authomatic Design of non cryptographic hash functions.           Supervised by Yago Saez and Pedro Isasi. Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain.                      18th of November, 2011

• Ahmad Salah El Ahmad. On the robustness of text based CAPTCHAs.                                    Supervised by Jeff Yan. Newcastle University, UK.                                                                              16th of November, 2011.

 I am currently involved in the following Conferences:

 ECIW2012, AFIN2012, IEEE TrustCom 2011, CCE 2011, ATC2011, IEEE RFID 2011, CCE2011

 I have recently reviewed for these Journals:

 IEEE Communication Letters,  Neural Computing and Applications, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security, International Journal of Information Security

 I am a Member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Digital Crime and Forensics IJDCF.

 Partial list of collaborators:

 Nasour Bagheri - Jorge Blasco -  John A. Clark - Tieyan Li - Pedro Peris Lopez - Raphael C. Phan - Jean Jacques Quisquater - El-Ghazali Talbi - Juan E. Tapiador - Pedro Isasi

  Chess is my main hobby. For checking how I am doing, visit my FIDE Chess profile, or go to to my Rating Progress Chart for some embarrasing data. For laughing at some of my games, or preparing against me, you could do much worse than visiting this excellent ChessTempo web with my games.