Statistical Security Analysis NIST and Security Enhancement of CBT Cipher for Secure Data and Image Transmission

Strong cybersecurity measures are essential in our digital world. This study presents a new cryptographic algorithm called CBT “Combined Blowfish Trilogy” which greatly improves the security of the traditional Blowfish algorithm without compromising computational efficiency. The encryption algorithm proposed herein presents a hybrid system which combines carefully designed countermeasures against side-channel attacks with three consecutive Blowfish Feistel network stages and surpasses the performance of DES, 3DES, AES, and Blowfish itself. The proposed algorithm is assessed using the Statistical Test Suite for Random and Pseudorandom Number Generators for Cryptographic Applications (NIST STS) consisting of the Mono-Bit, Run, Serial, Block Frequency, Spectral, Cumulative Sums, Entropy, and Avalanche tests. These results show that Combined Blowfish Trilogy is a good technique to prevent data security from side-channel attack breaches and it shows significant resistance against them as evidenced by the performance improvements observed over standard Blowfish (an average of 133.8% for text and 117.5% in image datasets according to NIST tests).

@article{Souror2026,
  title     = {Statistical Security Analysis NIST and Security Enhancement of CBT Cipher for Secure Data and Image Transmission},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {17},
  number    = {7},
  year      = {2026},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Walid W. Souror and Mohamed Fouad and Ali E. Takieldeen},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2026.0170766},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2026.0170766}
}