Concurrent Encryption and Lossless Compression using Inversion Ranks

Abstract

For secure and efficient transmission or storage, data files are commonly compressed and encrypted. In this work, we introduce a cost-effective encryption method of files as a built-in component of a lossless compression algorithm, thus avoiding the added cost of employing two separate processes. We have shown in earlier studies that preprocessing data with Burrows-Wheeler Transformation followed by Inversion Ranking transformation in advance of the utilization of an entropy coder resulted in an extremely effective general-purpose lossless compression technique [1], [2]. During the compression process, we encrypt the frequency vector of the Inversion Ranking transformation and transmit it along with the compressed data. Since the frequency vector is required for decompression, no further encryption is necessary to secure the compressed file, see Figure 1.