A PROPOSAL TO IMPROVE RC4 ALGORITHM BASED ON HYBRID CHAOTIC MAPS

Abstract

The explosion of data has led to the unpredictable growth of the amount of digital data transmitted over the network, representing image, text, sound, audio, video, etc. Also, rapid developments of the telecommunication network, mobile phone, and the internet have led to increasing the necessity to develop security algorithms to keep pace with these developments. Cryptography has a long history that provides a way to store sensitive information or transmit it across insecure networks (i.e. the Internet) so that it cannot be read by anyone except the intended recipient. Stream Cipher is one type of symmetric encryption in which one bit or one byte of digital data stream is encrypted at a time. If the cryptographic keystream is random, then the cipher is unbreakable. However, both users must be provided with the keystream in advance via some independent and secure channel. In this paper, the RC4 algorithm is improved by using hybrid chaotic maps which consist of logistic and tent map to strengthen the randomization process. The experimental results show high average security of the proposed algorithm compared with the original RC4.