Data Security: A New Symmetric Cryptosystem based on Graph Theory

Sharing private data in an unsecured channel is extremely critical, as unauthorized entities can intercept it and could break its privacy. The design of a cryptosystem that fulfills the security requirements in terms of confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of transmitted data has therefore become an unavoidable imperative. Indeed, a lot of work has been carried out in this regard. Although many cryptosystems have been proposed in the published literature, it has been found that their robustness and performance vary relatively from one to another. Adopting this reflection, we address in this paper the concept of block cipher, which is a major cryptographic solution to guarantee confidentiality, by involving the properties of graph theory to represent the plaintext message. Our proposal is in fact a new symmetric encryption block cipher that proceeds by representing plaintext messages using disjoint Hamiltonian circuits and then dealing with them as an adjacency matrix in a pre-encryption phase. The proposed system relies on a particular sub-key generator that has been carefully designed to produce the encryption keys according to the specifications of the system. The obtained experimental results demonstrate that our proposed cryptosystem is robust against statistical attacks, particularly the DIEHARD test, and presents both good confusion and good diffusion.

@article{Bekkaoui2021,
  title     = {Data Security: A New Symmetric Cryptosystem based on Graph Theory},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {12},
  number    = {9},
  year      = {2021},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Khalid Bekkaoui and Soumia Ziti and Fouzia Omary},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0120982},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0120982}
}