PACMATS: An Adaptive Symmetric Block Cipher for Parallel Computing Environments

Abstract

Conventional symmetric cryptographic algorithms are designed considering the cryptographic technicalities alone rather than the computing capabilities of the modern processing devices. Hence the performances of these algorithms are inconsistent and vary enormously when implemented in different computing systems with different processing capabilities. adaptive cryptographic algorithms that can be related with the characteristics of the present day computing devices are in great demand. Parallelized Adaptive Cipher with Modular Arithmetic, Transposition and Substitution (PACMATS) is a different class of cryptographic algorithm involving traditional techniques, which addresses these issues effectively. The size of the key and the plain text blocks are each 1024-bits. This symmetric block cipher is made adaptive by incorporating flexibility in deciding the size of the key and plain text sub-blocks and the number of rounds. Degree of Intra-packet parallelization, variety in grain size and the required security strength are achieved by suitably deciding the sub-block size. Flow of the algorithm is made dynamic by determining the execution steps through each key value at the runtime. The performance of the PACMATS is analyzed with implementations in shared memory parallel programming environment using OpenMP, Java Threads and MPI.