Enhancing Security of Text using Modified Encryption Algorithm

Due to growth in the use of internet, cell phones, multimedia technology, data security is the most critical problem. Data can be Text, Image, voice message, video etc. It is vital to provide security to secure confidential data while transmitting to protect information by various attacks like brute force attacks. This security to multimedia is achieved by cryptography. Cryptography is a technique of providing security to data by encryption process. Advanced Encryption Standard(AES) which is symmetric algorithm is used for encryption and decryption of Text. Performance of Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm is further enhanced by adding a key stream generator RC4 stream cipher. AES characteristics are its security and its resistance against attacks and the major characteristic of Rc4 is its speed. In this paper two above algorithms are combined and various approaches are suggested to provide additional security, as combination of both the ciphers is more secure than the original ciphers. Platform is generated using single core Microblaze soft core processor and the proposed combination of AES and RC4 algorithm are implemented on the developed platform which enhances the security of the data. Keywords—Advanced Encryption Standard, RC4 Algorithm, Stream Cipher, Microblaze, Atlys FPGA board.