International Journal of Computer Applications |
Foundation of Computer Science (FCS), NY, USA |
Volume 57 - Number 13 |
Year of Publication: 2012 |
Authors: Kondwani Magamba, Solomon Kadaleka, Ansley Kasambara |
10.5120/9178-3587 |
Kondwani Magamba, Solomon Kadaleka, Ansley Kasambara . Variable-length Hill Cipher with MDS Key Matrix. International Journal of Computer Applications. 57, 13 ( November 2012), 43-45. DOI=10.5120/9178-3587
The Hill Cipher is a classical symmetric cipher which breaks plaintext into blocks of size m and then multiplies each block by an m×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, a method is proposed to 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.