Building an initialization cipher block with two-dimensional operation and random parameters

Abstract

In recent years, parallel computing capabilities have been more powerful than before. Consequently some block cipher standards, such as DES used to protect important electronic messages, have been cracked in the past years. Also due to the rapid development of hardware processing speeds, 3DES and AES may someday be solved by brute-force attacks. Basically, the common characteristics of these block cipher standards are that each time, when a standard is invoked, the same parent key is used to generate subkeys. The subkeys are then utilized in the standard's encryption rounds to encrypt data. In fact, the variability of the key values is quite limited. Generally, producing random parameters to encrypt data is an effective method to improve the security of ciphertext. But how to ensure the security level of using and delivering these random parameters and how to avoid information leakage have been a challenge. So in this paper, we propose a novel random parameter protection approach, called the Initialization Cipher Block Method(ICBM for short), which protects random parameters by using a two-dimensional operation and employs random parameters to change the value of a fixed parent key for block ciphering, thus lowering the security risk of a block cipher algorithm. Security analysis demonstrates that the ICBM effectively improve the security level of a protected system. Of course, this also safely protect our homeland, particularly when it is applied to our governmental document delivery systems.