Lightweight Symmetric Encryption Algorithm for Secure Database

Abstract

Virtually all of today’s organizations store their data in huge databases to retrieve, manipulate and share them in an efficient way. Due to the popularity of databases for storing important and critical data, they are becoming subject to an overwhelming range of threats, such as unauthorized access. Such a threat can result in severe financial or privacy problems, as well as other corruptions. To tackle possible threats, numerous security mechanisms have emerged to protect data housed in databases. Among the most successful database security mechanisms is database encryption. This has the potential to secure the data at rest by converting the data into a form that cannot be easily understood by unauthorized persons. Many encryption algorithms have been proposed, such as Transposition-Substitution-Folding-Shifting encryption algorithm (TSFS), Data Encryption Standard (DES), and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithms. Each algorithm has advantages and disadvantages, leaving room for optimization in different ways. This paper proposes enhancing the TSFS algorithm by extending its data set to special characters, as well as correcting its substitution and shifting steps to avoid the errors occurring during the decryption process. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm, as it has outperformed the well-established benchmark algorithms, DES and AES, in terms of query execution time and database added size.