A review of Innovative Enhancement of the Caesar Cipher Algorithm for Cryptography

By: Bizuayehu Tadege, ID: bdu1300729

Faculty of Computing, Bahir Dar Institute of Technology, Bahir Dar University, Bahir Dar,
Ethiopia, Email:bizuayehutadege4@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
Cryptography is one mechanism used to secure our information flowing in unsecure channels
around the world. In this science there are several algorithms used to secure our information like
Caesar, AES, and DES etc. by using those algorithms we can secure the information from illegal
parties. In this paper the researchers tried to enhance the security of Caesar cipher by adding some
additional operation on the key to secure the shared key for communicating parties. The major
problem of Caesar cipher is easily cracked and to enhance those treat adding some feature is the
goal of researcher in this paper. For this paper, they conduct an experiment on three of the
algorithms that are proposed (enhanced Caesar cipher), AES and DES using three different file,
the file size of each of the file is different and the experiment bounded within time for encryption
and decryption. Finally, as the number of file size increase the encryption and decryption time also
increase. As a result, the enhanced Caesar cipher performs an encryption and decryption for those
different files in short time.

Keywords: Caesar-Cipher, Diffie-Hellman, Security, DES, AES

1. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, we are live in an interconnected world, and in this world there are several
communications performed between users to share information around the world without
physically coming together. The information share between parties are performed with the
advancement of technologies, and within those communication conducted there are hackers,
intruders, and other illegal users tried to intercept sensitive information from communicating
parties.
Here communicating parties does not get desired information from sender of the information,
because a certain modification or deletion of information is applied on original data in transition.
This modification of data in transition creates a conflict between parties that are communicating
with falsified information. To tackle such a problem, researchers tried to design new paradigm that
used for secure communication between communicating parties. The designed paradigm is call it
cryptography.
What is cryptography?
It is the art and science of protecting information from undesirable individuals by converting it
into a form non-recognizable by its attackers while stored and transmitted. Data cryptography
mainly is the scrambling( mix up) of the content of data, such as text, image, audio, video and so
forth to make the data unreadable, invisible or unintelligible during transmission or storage called
Encryption(Alanazi et al., 2010). The primary goal of cryptography is keeping data secure from
unauthorized attackers. The reverse of data encryption is data Decryption.
In encryption and decryption process cryptography is categorized in two i.e. symmetric key
cryptography and asymmetric cryptography. In symmetric key cryptography there is only one key
between the communication parties for encryption and decryption in asymmetric cryptography
there are two keys between communicating parties that are public and private key for encryption
they use receivers public key and to decrypt they use their own private key.
In this paper I tried to present enhancement of Caesar cipher in to DES, 3-DES and AES, why
enhancement for Caesar cipher is that in symmetric key cryptography there is only one key for
encryption and decryption as discuss before between communicating parties and it is vulnerable
to attacks by making different analysis techniques like brute force and statistical analysis.
As we know Caesar cipher is one of the oldest encryption algorithm used in encryption and
decryption and it is one of the fastest algorithm than others by replacing each of the characters
with in predetermined character and this algorithm is vulnerable to attacks. Because of
predetermined shift number substitutes each of the characters. As presented on the paper shift
number is 2, then to encrypt letter “A” then by proceeding forward “A” replace with “C” and this
is the case for easily broken by attackers by analyzing the character sequence from encrypted data.
The major aim for cryptography is to make a data make secure for every time. To secure and not
cracked by attackers, nowadays researchers tried to advance this Caesar cipher to other
encryption/decryption algorithm like DES, 3-DES and AES.
DES algorithm is one of the most widely used symmetric key encryption algorithm in the world
by making block cipher by taking a 64 bit plaintext block and convert them in to cipher text using
48 bit keys(Patil et al., 2016). The other advanced algorithm for DES is 3-DES it is similar with
DES, but the encryption process is triplicate means that three times perform an action on a plain
text to encrypt the text and introducing triple DES is to tackle the problem of DES form attacks.
This algorithm uses three key for encryption of a text(Patil et al., 2016). The final advanced
encryption algorithm used in this paper is AES, it is a symmetric encryption algorithm that used
public key for encryption and private key for encryption and it is more secure than other
algorithms. The key exchange (generation) between parties performed as Diffie-Helman
exchanging by performing some operation on common shared key like Diffie-Helman works for
enhanced Caesar cipher.
When we see the key generation of two parties A and B with a common key that they know is 13,
then A and B takes 12, 14 as private key respectively and A sends 13X12=156 to B and B send
13X14=182 to A again the result also multiplied and share it, then use the result as key to encrypt
the text as follows.
A: 182X12=2184
B: 156X14=2184
As shown in the calculation both A and B use 2184 to encrypt the text with module 26 to get the
first shit key to encrypt the first letter from given text, next divide the shared key with first shift
key and add the quotient on the shared key after that perform module of 26 to encrypt next letter
from given text. In a text there is a space replace with result of second module result value letter
and the result of module operation is zero add one on the key. This is the overall processes followed
to encrypt the text and key generation for enhancement of Caesar cipher for encryption.
2. Objective
The objectives of this paper is enhancing Caesar cipher by Appling different operation on key
generation and compare it with other encryption/decryption algorithm with time for performing
encryption and decryption within given different text data to enhance security feature.

3. METHODOLOGY
A. Tools and techniques
In this paper researchers take different algorithm to identify the security level and processing time
for encryption and decryption for different algorithms. The selected algorithms for this paper are
propose (enhanced Caesar cipher), AES and DES. By taking those three algorithms they conduct
an experiment for encryption and decryption with the threshold of time and file size for each
algorithm.

B. Dataset preparation
For this experiment the researcher takes three text file with each of the file have 5, 10, 20 kb file
size respectively and perform an encryption and encryption on each of the file using enhanced
Caesar cipher, DES and AES to identify the secure algorithm for data communication between
parties and the experiments are bounded in time for encryption and decryption of text file using
different file size.
Fig1: Flow chart of the given algorithm
4. CRITIQUES
A. Weakness
The major weakness of this paper is, it does not have enough dataset for experimentation and the
workflow of each of the algorithm is not visible in this paper. The paper does not show the clear
way of expression for which algorithm the key generation is performed, is for DES,AES, or Caesar
cipher and in addition to that the experimentation threshold variable is limited not consider other
variables like storage.
In short, the paper presents the theoretical part of each of the algorithms without proper
consideration of each of the algorithm tasks like how they works but they perform experimentation
on each of the algorithm. The paper does not present how the experimental result comes from each
of the algorithm.

B. Strong side
The paper presents, in taking about encryption and decryption for particular data the time of
execution and as file size of the plaintext increases the time taken for encryption and it also
enhanced decryption for each of the algorithm. I clearly explained the result of the experiment in
conclusion part and the paper show within example in each step how the normal Caesar cipher
works and also how the enhanced Caesar cipher works. The paper also conduct an experimentation
on different algorithms to identify the weakness or better performance of the proposed algorithm
for a unique file in different file size in time bound.
5. REFERENCES

Alanazi, H. O., Zaidan, B. B., Zaidan, A. A., Jalab, H. A., Shabbir, M., & Al-Nabhani, Y.
(2010). New Comparative Study Between DES, 3DES and AES within Nine Factors. 2(3),
152–157. http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.4085
Patil, P., Narayankar, P., Narayan, D. G., & Meena, S. M. (2016). A Comprehensive Evaluation
of Cryptographic Algorithms: DES, 3DES, AES, RSA and Blowfish. Procedia Computer
Science, 78(December 2015), 617–624. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2016.02.108