A novel and robust symmetric block cipher for hand-held mobile devices

Abstract

The world is on the path of digitization, that is, what all things that are done manually are now done with the help of computing devices. Modern era has seen the rise of computing devices, especially hand held devices. Information, in large quantity, can be digitalized and stored on these devices. Also these information must be shared to others devices, connected either via wired or wireless links, which are insecure channels. Information is a long term resource to any individual and/or organization and hence privacy of the information is of great importance. Privacy can be achieved by applying any cryptographic approaches, which transforms meaningful data into meaningless form. There are different ciphers like DES, RC's, AES and so on, which provide high confidentiality of message but these cannot be used on devices which have small amount of processing power and memory. This paper proposes a new symmetric key block cipher which can be used on large as well as small devices. The new cipher has a block cipher of 160-bit and the enciphering of plain-text takes place using 160-bit key, in 8 rounds. The confusion concept is brought into the cipher using a s-box which is dynamic in nature and the s-box contents depend on the key. For each round, the s-box contents vary thereby bringing in strong resilience against basic attacks. The cipher possesses simple xor-ing operations, which is fast, making it ideal for all kinds of applications.