Educational Application for Information Protection with the use of Cryptographic Methods - part I

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to protect the transmission of important information from hacker attacks. This is achieved by encrypting the messages before transmission and decrypting them after their receipt, respectively. A Windows desktop application has been developed for purely educational purpose. For this reason, only basic substitution and transposition methods are implemented in it. Namely: Caesar cipher (simple monoalphabetic substitution), direct substitution cipher, polyalphabetic substitution cipher and matrix substitution cipher; a transposition cipher with text blocks or with text formatting. Three roles are implemented in the suggested application: administrator, teacher and student. The interface of the application consists of 2 parts: presentation and logical. Additionally, it contains a data section, including text files that the application can work with. This type of applications can be used in different areas of human life. For example, to protect information in custom text files (.doc,. txt,. pdf etc.) that can be written to various storage devices (hard drives, flash drives, DVDs, CDs etc.) or sent via e-mail or stored in cloud space. The information can be related to management, finance or military purposes. The transmitted data may be to banks, insurance companies or other corporations making responsible economic and financial transactions.