Hybrid encryption algorithm based on symmetric and asymmetric ciphers

Abstract

In trusted computing architecture, security is one of crucial aspects to protect the design against hardware or software attacks. The symmetric encryption method works great for fast encryption of large data. Still, it doesn’t provide identity verification. Meanwhile, the asymmetric encryption method makes sure that the data is accessed by authorized recipient with public private key pair. However, this verification makes the encryption process slow when implemented at scale. Work here intends to develop and analyse the hybrid algorithms. In this study, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with fixed 16 bytes of block and 128-bit key length is chosen as symmetric cryptography algorithm. Meanwhile, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman (RSA) with 1024, 2048 and 3072-bits key length and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) with 192, 224 and 256-bits key length with two different curves: Brain pool and NIST SECP are chosen as asymmetric algorithms. These two asymmetric algorithms are compared to determine which algorithms can produce a best performance with the combination of symmetric algorithm. Cryptographic algorithms are developed and written using Python3.8. The performance of application is evaluated using computational time for key generation, encryption and decryption phases with different input data set and key lengths. Overall, hybrid ECC has better performance in key generation phase due to its smaller key sizes and hybrid RSA has better performance in encryption and decryption due to its less complexity of algorithm. From findings, it can be summarized that AES-256-GCM + ECC-secp192r1 is the best combination of hybrid algorithm.