Multimedia Encryption using Hybrid Cryptographic Approach

Data security is of utmost importance in today’s world. Especially when the data is travelling through an insecure communication network. There are symmetric key encryption techniques which use only one key for both encryption and decryption of the data. They are simple in design but can be easily cracked using brute force attacks. The entire security of such a cipher could be compromised if the attacker anyhow gets access to the keys. On the other hand, there are asymmetric key based algorithms which use a pair of keys, one for encryption, and the other for decryption, whose security is higher as compared to the symmetric ones but lack in time efficiency. It is also difficult to manage such a huge base of key-pairs efficiently and safely. This paper mainly focusses on the implementation of a system capable of encryption and decryption of multimedia data (Text, Images, Videos, Audio etc.) using a hybrid model based on the amalgamation of symmetric encryption techniques such as AES[1] and asymmetric techniques such as ECC. ECC is based on the toughness of the discrete logarithm problem (DLP), whose public key is short, network bandwidth is little and ability to resist to attack is strong which makes it really difficult to guess the keys. Even if the attacker gets access to any of the keys, he or she won’t be in a position to decipher it in a relatively finite amount of man-years.