Encryption Project

[JennaTailier]

Hi I am looking for a good project to do on my degree, i thought encryption may be a good topic, i was going to create some simple encryption algorithms but apparently that usnt good enough, i need to get some exisitng encryption algorithms and compare their performance against each other then create one of my own to compare.

does anyone know any encyption algorithms and how i can go about this?

[emceenugget]

depends on how complex you wanna go with encryption. you can do a simple xor, you can create a hash, or you can go with a full blown algorithm like rsa.

[JennaTailier]

i think i want to go quite simple, i could write a simple algorithm to replace plain text with cypher text but i need to compare against other algorithms.

is there any software which tests the security of algorithms?

im really struggling to find things to write about regarding this topic.

i have to write 10,000 words and implement something. please help!

[CJSLMAN]

Well there are a lot of encryptions methods:
Atbash - exchange the first letter of the alphabet with last last, the second with next ot the last, etc...
Ceaser's shift - shift the letter wanted by a certain number of letters... for example by 3, A > D, B >E and C > F, etc. A variant of this is rot-13, which is was popular on old message boards.
Vigenère - The Vigenère encryption is the most famous polyalphabetic algorithm. for more info: Vigenère cipher - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Enigma - The German encoding machine during WWII used 3 or 4 rotors to encrypt messages.
Modern - DES, RSA, etc.

and tons of variants of the above listed...

some links:
Cryptography - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Encryption - New World Encyclopedia

Last week, just for the fun of it, I decided to try to come up with a new encryption method and in the end it turned out to be a variant of the Vigenère method (didn't mean for it to turn out that way... it just did :-)

Luck,
CJSL

[xcallmejudasx]

What level degree is this? Bachelor, Masters, Doctorate?
If it's bachelor I'd recommend testing a group of similar encryption techniques, Vigenere, Caesar's shift, and Atbash all work on a shift principle on the alphabet so they should be easier to compare.

If this is a doctorate I'd go with the current Defense standard(RSA I believe) because
1) The equation used to encrypt is public knowledge so you can freely access it and get a really good understanding of it if you handle the math(I have no idea how it works so I won't comment on if the math is even very hard or if it's just super complex)
2) There is already some data out on it for benchmarking because it was part of the competition to find the next encryption standard so you will be able to use those values along with the other competitors.

[JennaTailier]

What level degree is this? Bachelor, Masters, Doctorate?
If it's bachelor I'd recommend testing a group of similar encryption techniques, Vigenere, Caesar's shift, and Atbash all work on a shift principle on the alphabet so they should be easier to compare.

Hello, thank you for your reply, its an ordinary degree i am doing and decided on encryption for my project/dissertation style assignment (not knowing what a can of worms i'd opened)

i have created a Caesars shift algorithm, and a brute force attacker on it. i have looked up Vigenere which is very similar to Caesars, cant find any code on how to implement this - i can try to write my own program but am running out of time.

Atbash i will look into tonight - does anyone have any ideas how i can compare them? i wanted to brute force them and test iterations on key length so see which is most secure, but cant find much on that on the internet. i need graphs and testing to support my research.

does anyone have any ideas?

[OrangeDog]

Even RSA is a little basic. AES is the common best-known used algorithm.

There is no way to benchmark the security of an encryption scheme - you have to use maths and cunning. Encryption schemes are also more than just algorithms. For example - using ECB with AES is useless when applied to images.

A common project topic is to explore methods of steganography. This is a field that offers many trade-offs in detection, durability and capacity and is of good academic value. There is nothing new to be learned from basic shift-ciphers.