A Hybrid Lightweight Cipher Algorithm

Abstract

The speed development of the Internet applications and the explosive technology growth changed the lifestyle radically. The amount of data is increasing rapidly. Many of these data are sensitive and private. To protect these data, the lightweight encryption was developed. The paper proposing a new lightweight algorithm for securing the important data. The main objective of this mode is to achieve a trusted data transport throughout an open environment. The proposed algorithm involves design a modern lightweight symmetric block cipher algorithm that encrypts the sensitive data across unsecure channel. The designed algorithm works with 64-bit of encrypted data under 64-bit of secret ciphering key. The structure of the proposed algorithm is based on the combining the Substitution Permutation network and the Feistel network structures with 10, 16 or 20 rounds. The structure selection process depends on the binary bit-value for the ciphering key where zero for Feistel and one for SPN. The submitted cipher encompasses of three main layers: non-linear layer, linear layer and key addition layer. The proposed algorithm is applied for image encryption. Many of evaluation measure are computed according to several important metrics in terms of the randomness tests, avalanche effect test, time of implementation test, correlation, entropy, the Number of Modifying Pixel Rate (NPCR) and Unified Average Adjusted Intensity (UACI). All of them give us qualified results