A Secure Variant of the Hill Cipher

Abstract: The Hill cipher is a classical symmetric encryption algorithm that succumbs to the know-plaintext attack. Although its vulnerability to cryptanalysis has rendered it unusable in practice, it still serves an important pedagogical role in cryptology and linear algebra. In this paper, a variant of the Hill cipher is introduced that makes the Hill cipher secure while it retains the efficiency. The proposed scheme includes a ciphering core for which a cryptographic protocol is introduced.