Human beings are always suspicious when you send a message to someone; you always
suspect that someone else will intercept it and read it or modify it before re-sending.
The World Wide Web and Internet has a great impact on our life. The Internet has
created several security problems. Confidentiality and authentication are needed.
Network security is a set of protocols that allow us to use the services effectively
without worrying about security attacks (Atul, 2003; William, 2006; and 2008).
Cryptography is the science of encrypting and decrypting information. It first
originated in 2000 BC at Egypt, where hieroglyphs were used to decorate the tombs of
dead rulers and kings, which narrated a story of the life of the king and talked about
the great acts of his life. They were deliberately cryptic, but not intended to hide text
(http://all.net/edu/curr/ip/Chap2-1.html; and Behrouz, 2007). The Chinese did not
use cryptography very much. However, it was widespread and quite advanced in India,
where the government used to communicate with the spies. The famous Greek drama
Bellerophon refers to the usage of cryptography, which was used when Bellerophon was
sent to the king with a secret tablet. Julius Caesar developed a good method known as
Caesar Cipher. Leon Battista Alberti is known as the father of ‘Western Cryptography’,
while James Lovell is considered as the father of ‘American Cryptography’ (http://
web.itu.edu.tr/~orssi/dersler/cryptography/Chap2-1.pdf). Later Thomas Jefferson
invented ‘Wheel Cipher’. Cryptography was also used in World War-I and II. The
German Enigma Machine was developed by Arthur Scherbius, and the Japanese
developed the Purple Machine (Behrouz, 2007).
In the 1970s, Dr. Horst Feistel established the precursor to what we call today Data
Encryption Standard (DES). He came up with a family of ciphers called ‘Feistel Ciphers’
during his work tenure with IBM. In 1976, National Security Agency (NSA) worked
with Feistel Cipher to establish FIPS PUB-46, known today as DES. Presently, Triple
DES is playing the key role for providing a better security standard. The two colleagues
of Feistel, Whitefield Diffie and Martin Hellman, first introduced the idea of Public
Key Cryptography in a publication entitled “New Directions in Cryptography”
(www.jgrcs.info/index.php/jgrcs/article/download/16/16). Today’s software industry uses
Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), which was first introduced by Phil Zimmerman. In 1977,
Ronald L Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard M. Adleman developed a new Public key
Algorithm, RSA. In the mid-1980s, ROT 13 was employed by USENET groups to
prevent the viewing of “objectionable material by innocent eyes”. In 1990, a new
algorithm with 128-bit, which acts as a replacement to DES algorithm, known as
International Data Encryption Algorithm (IDEA) was developed by Xuejia Lai and
James Massey. This algorithm effectively works for business and households. In 1991,
Phil Zimmerman released the first version of PGP, a freeware product. In 1994, Ron
Rivest published a new algorithm RC5, which is stronger than DES. In December
2001, National Institute of Science of Technology (NIST) published a symmetric-key
block cipher known as “Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)” (Gary, 2012; and
Andrew, 2003). In this paper, we present a new symmetric key algorithm.
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