High Diffusion Cipher: Encryption and Error Correction in a Single Cryptographic Primitive

In this paper we combine the error correction and encryption functionality into one block cipher, which we call High Diffusion (HD) cipher. The error correcting property of this cipher is due to the novel error correction code which we call High Diffusion code used in its diffusion layer. Theoretical bounds on the performance of the HD cipher in terms of security and error correction are derived. We show that the proposed HD cipher provides security equivalent to Rijndael cipher against linear and differential cryptanalysis. Experiments based on a four round HD cipher reveal that traditional concatenated systems using the Rijndael cipher followed by Reed Solomon codes require 89% more expansion to match the performance of HD cipher.