PCHET: An efficient programmable cellular automata based hybrid encryption technique for multi-chat client-server applications

Abstract

This paper demonstrates an efficient programmable Cellular Automata (CA) based hybrid encryption technique (PCHET) for chatting applications involving multiple clients who can chat simultaneously with each other. The proposed scheme is a symmetric key encryption technique, still very lightweight and it is easy to implement. The base of the work lies in the attributes of various CA rules and their cryptographic properties. These principles rely upon the state data of its neighbors and that of its own. Further, it creates chaotic and random next state data which is extremely difficult to anticipate and its inversion is practically exorbitant in all aspects. This work is implemented in java. The evaluation outcomes of different randomness tests prescribed by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and DIEHARD test suits show that the scheme is capable of generating high degree of randomness in the ciphertext. In addition to these, a thorough comparative investigation is done with existing similar kind of ciphers such as Data Encryption Standard (DES), 3DES and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). The execution time of the proposed work is much better than the existing scheme as it is practically required for end-to-end encryption in case of chatting applications involving multiple clients. PCHET has achieved an improvement of 1.65% in terms of execution time.