An efficient secure code approach based on indexed table quasi group encryption with Hadamard and Number Theoretic Transformation for software protection

Abstract

Software security has become one of the active areas of research due to various cyber threats and attacks that can be very dangerous. A majority of these software threats directly affects the security aspects such as confidentiality, integrity and accessibility. These software threats such as reverse engineering, tampering, etc., exploit the authenticated data of the software. Various techniques have been developed to deal with the software threats and attacks. But, most of the existing software protection techniques do not provide reliable security against various attacks. Recently, Cryptographic approaches are found to be very effective in handling the software threats and attacks. Code encryption has received much attention in the field of software security. This paper proposes a novel software protection code encryption scheme based on the index table. This approach uses a novel and efficient encryption technique called quasigroup encryption for encryption the indexed table. It provides least resemblance of the original data when encrypted. Quasigroups effectively produce an astronomical number of keys which confuses the hackers in identifying the original data. But, quasi group encryption is not efficient in diffusing the statistics of the plain text. Hence, this approach uses chained Hadamard transforms and Number Theoretic Transforms to introduce diffusion along with the quasigroup transformation. The experimental results evaluate the performance of the proposed encryption approach based on the time cost and space cost and it is observed that the proposed approach provides significant results.