An enhanced Honey Encryption to protect transmitted data using Residue Number System

Abstract

This study proposed an Enhanced Honey Encryption to protect Transmitted Data using Residue Number System. This is to allow Honey Encryption (HE) carter for the security of numeric and text data transmitted through an unsecure network. Data is transmitted either offline or online, and as technology advances, online transmission of data gets more attention, and as a result, unauthorized people try to intrude on the privacy of the data being transmitted.  Different encryption algorithms have been used to protect the privacy of this data. However, most of the existing methods are vulnerable to brute force attack because the cipher text remains unintelligible and unmeaningful. This confirms invalid key, until the original data is found. Honey Encryption (HE) helps to eliminate vulnerability and withstand brute force attack. However, its problem is that, it works only on numeric data. Hybridization of 'HE' with other algorithms like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Blowfish, etc. were carried out by some researchers, to protect text data but these lead to computational problem and slow processing time. The proposed system hybridized HE with Residue Number System (RNS) improves the capability of HE in protecting text data with less processing time. Distribution Transformation Encoder (DTE) was used to encode each action word by mapping it to its perfect dictionary word and antonyms, and standard conversion table was use to convert each character ASCII code. Traditional Moduli Set (2ⁿ-1, 2ⁿ, 2ⁿ+1) was used to generate the key which produces the ciphertext while Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) together with DTE were used for decrypting the ciphertext. When an incorrect key is used to access the data, HE generates an indistinguishable fake but meaningful data, this helps deter attacker from trying further. The proposed system allows HE to protect text data with less processing time compared to other systems.  N-values, message size, processing time and security were used to test and evaluate its efficiency.  Comparing the obtained results with the existing ones, the proposed system processing time is lesser and more secured because the ciphertext produced is deceiving, and to decrypt it, it requires a lot of efforts like finding the sequence of algorithms used, getting the moduli set used, determining the value of n for the moduli set, knowing the character table and also determining the Distribution Transformation Encoder design.