Credit card number encryption using firework-based key generation

Abstract

Encryption of credit card numbers (CCNs) is essential since it is vulnerable to eavesdropping when stored in the database or during transfer in the network. Security of data is the necessity of the hour since communications over open network occur frequently. A novel algorithm termed credit card number encryption (CCE) is proposed to encrypt the CCN. The algorithm works in two phases. In the first phase, the CCN is represented as a binary image and the binary image is encoded as digits. The second phase involves the design of a stream cipher method to encrypt the encoded image using a fireworks key generation credit card number encryption (FWKGCNE) algorithm for key generation. One outstanding advantage of CCE algorithm is the reduction in the number of keys to be stored and distributed. Experimental results demonstrating encryption of CCNs using CCE algorithm and the comparison with the existing methods are presented. Simulation and analysis results show that CCE algorithm is greatly sensitive to the keys and the algorithm has a large space of keys. Security analysis of CCE algorithm was performed to demonstrate that the algorithm is resistant to image attacks.