Implementation and evaluation of EMAES – A hybrid encryption algorithm for sharing multimedia files with more security and speed

Abstract

In this era of smartphones, a huge amount of multimedia files like audio, video, images, animation, and plain text are shared. And with this comes the threat of data being stolen and misused. Most people don’t think about the security of data before uploading it to any platform. Most apps used on smartphones upload our data to their server. Not only this, but other third-party apps can also read that data while it is being transmitted. One solution to this problem is encrypting the data before sharing it and decrypting it back at the other end so that even if it is intercepted in between the transmission, it would be impossible to decrypt it. In this paper, a newly designed hybrid encryption algorithm EMAES that includes the efficiency of MAES (Modified Advanced Encryption Standard) and security of ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) was implemented in MATLAB as well as in android studio 4.0. using a mobile messaging application. Also, it was tested for different speeds and security parameters. Further, it was compared with standard algorithms like the RC4, RC6 and Blowfish as well as with other hybrid algorithms like RC4+ECC, RC6+ECC and Blowfish+ECC. The EMAES was found 30% more efficient in terms of encryption and decryption time. The security of EMAES also showed improvement when compared with other hybrid algorithms for parameters like SSIM (structural similarity index measure), SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio), PSNR(Peak Signal to Noise Ratio), MSE (Mean Squared Error) and RMSE (Root Mean Squared Error). And finally, no significant improvement was found in the CPU and RAM usage.