Security Evaluation of the Enhanced IDEA Algorithm

Abstract

Data security is an important issue, and cryptographic algorithms are essential parts of security. IDEA is a symmetric block cipher, and it uses the mixing of three different algebraic operations. In this study, an enhanced IDEA algorithm is presented, and it is based on the middle square method and circular shifting techniques. The enhancement will cover the number of rounds, bit adjustment, shifting, during the encryption and decryption phase. Findings reveal that the proposed method could generate a ciphertext with only 28.83 ms. As to the avalanche effect, it achieved 50.35%, which passed the criteria of encryption. Also, the sequence of the output is random. For its frequency (monobit) test, the result shows 0.789, frequency test within a block has 0.997462, and a run test of 0.897437. The result showed that the enhanced IDEA passed the different tests. To further assess the algorithm, other techniques to evaluate the performance of the enhanced IDEA are considered, and modification is also encouraged to strengthen the security.