Abstract
Background: In 21st century one of the emerging issues is to secure the information stored and communicated in digital form. There is no assurance that the data we have sent may be hacked by any hacker and the data we have sent may reach correctly to the receiver or not. Thus, confidentiality, integrity, and authentication services play major role in Internet communication. Encryption is the process of encoding messages in such a way that only authorized parties can read and understand after successful decryption. Several data security techniques have been emerged in recent years, but still there is a need to develop new and different techniques to protect the digital information from attackers. This paper provides a new idea for data encryption and decryption using the notion of binary tree traversal to secure digital data.
Objective: To develop a new data encryption and decryption method using the notion of binary tree traversal to secure data.
Method: The proposed method uses both transposition and substitution techniques for converting plaintext into ciphertext. The notion binary tree in-order traversal is adapted as transposition and Caesar cipher technique for substitution.
Results: From the result, it observed that the repeating letters in the plaintext are replaced with different cipher letters. Hence, it is infeasible to predict the plaintext message easily using letter frequency analysis. From the experimental result, it is concluded that the proposed method provides different ciphertext for the same plaintext message when the number of round varies. The time taken by the proposed method for encryption is very less.
Conclusion: A simple encryption method using binary tree in-order traversal and Caesar cipher is developed. Encrypting data using binary tree traversals is a different way while compared with other traditional encryption methods. The proposed method is fast, secure and can be used to encrypt short messages in real time applications.
Keywords: Cryptography, encryption, decryption, permutation, binary tree traversals, algorithms.
Graphical Abstract