Year: 2012
Type: preprint
Abstract: The Hill Cipher is a classical symmetric cipher which breaks plaintext into blocks of size m and then multiplies each block by an m by m key matrix to yield ciphertext. However, it is well known that the Hill cipher succumbs to cryptanalysis relatively easily. As a result, there have been efforts to strengthen the cipher through the use of various techniques e.g. permuting rows and columns of the key matrix to encrypt each plaintext vector with a new key matrix. In this paper, we strengthen the security of the Hill cipher against a known-plaintext attack by encrypting each plaintext matrix by a variable-length key matrix obtained from a Maximum Distance Separable (MDS) master key matrix.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Institution: University of Malawi
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2171676862