Password security by encryption using an extended ADFGVX cipher

Abstract

Login will be the critical step for most of the web users for the user authentication. As hackers utilizing a variety of techniques to steal the passwords, it is recommended to offer secured transmission of passwords to the servers from the client system. Current web developers are using common traditional hashing techniques for securing passwords over the network. However, hashing techniques are vulnerable to several attacks like brute-force attack, dictionary attack, and birthday attack. This paper implemented password security with an easy and robust transposition based encryption technique using an extended ADFGVX cipher. The proposed cipher uses two 7 × 6 Polybius squares for encryption to accommodate common characters of the password along with the random key for encryption. Finally, this study considered four metrics for performance evaluation and compared the proposed method with the state-of-art techniques. It is found that the proposed method performed excellently regarding complexity for cracking password and satisfactorily concerning execution time.