Compression and encryption technique on securing TFTP packet

Abstract

Data compression technique such as Huffman coding, arithmetic coding, Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) method and others has been playing a vital role in the area of data transmission for reducing time usage during retrieving and transmitting data. However, this technique does not prevent data which contain secret information from being tampered or hacked by malicious attacks even in limited area network environment. Apart from the need of reducing data volume, an implementation of encryption is an important concern in order to transmit data over perfect security. This paper presents feasible approach in minimizing quantity of data and ensuring its security; data is compressed using a lossless algorithm, i.e. Huffman coding and then the compressed data is encrypted using symmetric encryption, AES algorithm. In this work, key exchange concept is also proposed based on Diffie Hellman Key Exchange (DHKE) which is used to exchange secret key for data encryption and decryption. The data is transferred in a local network between two computers through simple file transfer protocol known as Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP). This protocol has been used widely for updating and transferring files especially to embedded devices and it would provide more benefit if security features were incorporated into this protocol. Thus, a lightweight security strategy which includes compression and encryption is an efficient solution to the security issue and to reducing file sizes in this type of environment. Experimental results based on proposed methodology are provided to analyze execution time of transmitting compressed-encrypted data and percentage reduction of file space.