Using genetic algorithms to build symmetric crypto algorithms

Author: levani nikoleishvili
Keywords: Genetic algorithms, cryptography, cryptographic algorithms, block cipher
Annotation:

Today, in the information age, information sharing and transfer play an important role in daily life. With the popularization of Internet and exponential increase in e-commerce transactions security has become an inevitable and an integral part of any e-commerce application. Data integrity, confidentiality, authenticity, nonrepudiation have gained tremendous importance and have become important components of information security. There are many risks involved in communication of plain text over Internet. Cryptography is a technique of encoding and decoding messages so that they cannot be interpreted by anybody except the sender and the intended recipient. Genetic Algorithm (GA) is an invaluable tool for solving optimization problems due to its robustness. It does not break even if the inputs are changed slightly or in the presence of a reasonable noise. GA offers significant benefits over other optimization techniques in searching a large state space or n-dimensional surfac, but there is very few papers exist on its use in cryptographic algorithms. Mohammad Sazzadul Hoque et.al have presented an intrusion detection system by applying GA to efficiently detect various types of network intrusions. The genetic algorithm evolutionary theory / feature and classification rules of the reason for the data (traffic) to reduce the complexity of the filter, on which a number of other papers have been published. In this paper, we have tried to find ways to use a genetic algorithm to build a crypto algorithm and to implement its software. Our crypto-algorithm is a poly-alphabetic block cipher that uses a pseudo-random number generator (linear congruent generator) and genetic operations — namely, crossover and mutation — to encode / decode messages, in addition to a symmetric key. The settings required for the generator and operations are also part of a key known only to the sender and receiver of the message. All this, of course, makes the crypto-algorithm even more robust.