Abstract
This paper presents an efficient chaotic-based block encryption cipher (CBBEC), which is a symmetric encryption algorithm designed with the potential of increasing security and improving performance. It is a hybrid mixture from chaos theory and cryptography. Its salient features include the use of eight working registers providing capability to handle 256-bits plaintext/ciphertext block sizes, employing a chaotic logistic map in key scheduling to generate session key used in encryption/decryption, the essential heavy use of data-dependent rotations and the inclusion of integer multiplication as an additional primitive operation. The use of multiplication with eight working registers greatly increases the diffusion achieved per round, allowing for greater security, fewer rounds and increased throughput. Comparative performance evaluation of the proposed chaotic-based block encryption cipher CBBEC with Rijndael, RC6 and RC5 is addressed. Experimental results show that the proposed CBBEC is a fast block cipher, showing its great potential in real-time encryption applications.