A combination of hill cipher and RC4 methods for text security

Abstract

To hide confidential messages from people who are not responsible or who can access the messages, a way is needed to hide the messages. One way to hide messages in transmission is to change the data into something unintelligible by encoding and embedding it using cryptography and steganography techniques. This application was built using the hill cipher algorithm and the Rivest Cipher 4 (RC4) method. This algorithm is a symmetric key algorithm which has several advantages in data encryption. The hill chiper algorithm uses a mxm matrix as the encryption and decryption key. Meanwhile, the RC4 symmetric key is in the form of a stream cipher which can process input data as well as messages or information. Input data is generally in the form of bytes or even bits. The results of this research show that hill cipher and RC4 have their respective advantages and disadvantages. However, currently, RC4 is generally considered less safe for use in security-critical scenarios due to its vulnerability to attack. It is highly recommended to use an encryption algorithm such as advanced encryption standard (AES) which is modern and strong and has been tested and proven to be more resilient.