Advanced encryption standard with asymmetric key exchange for text encryption

Abstract

When creating communication systems, securing data is crucial and improved randomization in creating secret keys contributes to more secure systems. Unfortunately, the symmetric ciphers used for data encryption, such as the advanced encryption standard (AES), may be subject to attacks that exploit timing measurements to deduce the secret key used for encryption, resulting in a significant lack of research on the security of hybrid implementations (usually defined as incorporating AES and asymmetric ciphers) for AES encryption. We introduce a new hybrid encryption method that combines the AES encryption standard with elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). In this hybrid form of encryption, ECC is utilized to facilitate secure encryption and transmission of the AES key and cycle through 16 rounds of AES to encrypt the majority of the data. We provide a performance comparison between the new algorithm and the AES-128 encryption standard. Our findings indicate that the new hybrid encryption method produced an average encryption time of 0.0002 seconds for 10MB files, significantly faster than the AES-128 encryption standard, which takes an average of 0.0016 seconds. The new hybrid method exhibits significant resistance to cryptanalytical attempts, experiencing an average avalanche effect of 49.84%, while maintaining the AES nonlinearity value at 112. As such, we conclusively state that the new hybrid encryption method utilizing ECC and AES will provide effective security for user data against timing side-channel attacks while remaining an efficient method for performing encryption.