A Cryptosystem for Encryption and Decryption of Long Confidential Messages

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a cryptosystem which can encrypt and decrypt long (text) messages in efficient manner. The proposed cryptosystem is a combination of symmetric-key and asymmetric-key cryptography, where asymmetric-key cryptography is used to transmit the secret key to an intended receiver and the sender/receiver encrypts/decrypts messages using that secret key. In 2002, Hwang et al. proposed a scheme for encrypting long messages. The main drawback of their scheme is that it requires more computational overhead. Our proposed scheme is more efficient from the computational point of view compared to that of their scheme. Our scheme is a block cipher, long messages are broken into fixed length plaintext blocks for encryption. It supports parallel computation, since encryption/decryption of all the blocks of plaintext/plaintext are independent and thus can be carried out simultaneously. In addition, our scheme retains the same security level as their scheme.