A New Symmetric Key Encryption Algorithm With Higher Performance

Abstract

In this era of information technology, information security is a major concern. To address the challenges of data security, cryptography is used for storage as well as for the communication of data. A cryptographic algorithm has two main performance characteristics: the ability to secure data against different attacks and the processing speed. An algorithm is considered secure if no attack exists to reveal the original contents without knowing the key. The strength of any secure encryption algorithm is, therefore, generally measured based on the difficulty to obtain the encryption key through cyber-attacks such as brute force. It is presumed that the bigger the key size, the more difficult it is for the attacker to compute the key. Consequently, increasing the key size generally increases the computational complexity and processing time of algorithms. As a result, an established assumption is the existence of a tradeoff and computational complexity. In this paper, we are presenting an alternate symmetric key encryption algorithm, which can easily avoid long and complex computation of conventional popular symmetric key encryption algorithms such as the Data Encryption Standards and the Advance Encryption Standard. We have shown that despite providing a higher level of security, one simplest software implementation of our algorithm is faster than some previously implemented conventional algorithms. Additionally, our algorithm also provides other advantages such as inherent data compression option and flexibility of choosing different complexity levels according to the need for different applications.