Entropy, Vol. 21, Pages 701: A Security Enhanced Encryption Scheme and Evaluation of Its Cryptographic Security (Entropy)

An approach for security enhancement of a class of encryption schemes is pointed out and its security is analyzed. The approach is based on certain results of coding and information theory regarding communication channels with erasures and deletion errors. In the security enhanced encryption scheme, the wiretapper faces a problem of cryptanalysis after a communication channel with bits deletion and a legitimate party faces a problem of decryption after a channel with bit erasures. This paper proposes the encryption-decryption paradigm for the security enhancement of lightweight block ciphers based on dedicated error-correction coding and a simulator of the deletion channel controlled by the secret key. The security enhancement is analyzed in terms of the related probabilities, equivocation, mutual information and channel capacity. The cryptographic evaluation of the enhanced encryption includes employment of certain recent results regarding the upper-bounds on the capacity of channels with deletion errors. It is shown that the probability of correct classification which determines the cryptographic security depends on the deletion channel capacity, i.e., the equivocation after this channel, and number of codewords in employed error-correction coding scheme. Consequently, assuming that the basic encryption scheme has certain security level, it is shown that the security enhancement factor is a function of the deletion rate and dimension of the vectors subject to error-correction encoding, i.e., dimension of the encryption block.