Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D. in Engineering Science

Department

Electrical Engineering

First Advisor

Mustafa Matalgah

Second Advisor

Xin Dang

Third Advisor

Alexander Yakovlev

Relational Format

dissertation/thesis

Abstract

Encryption is a vital process to ensure the confidentiality of the information transmitted over an insecure wireless channel. However, the nature of the wireless channel tends to deteriorate because of noise, interference and fading. Therefore, a symmetrically encrypted transmitted signal will be received with some amount of error. Consequently, due to the strict avalanche criterion (sac), this error propagates during the decryption process, resulting in half the bits (on average) after decryption to be in error. In order to alleviate this amount of error, smart coding techniques and/or new encryption algorithms that take into account the nature of wireless channels are required. The solution for this problem could involve increasing the block and key lengths which might degrade the throughput of the channel. Moreover, these solutions might significantly increase the complexity of the encryption algorithms and hence to increase the cost of its implementation and use. Two main approaches have been folloto solve this problem, the first approach is based on developing an effective coding schemes and mechanisms, in order to minimize and correct the errors introduced by the channel. The second approach is more focused on inventing and implementing new encryption algorithms that encounter less error propagation, by alleviating the sac effect. Most of the research done using these two approaches lacked the comprehensiveness in their designs. Some of these works focused on improving the error performance and/or enhancing the security on the cost of complexity and throughput. In this work, we focus on solving the problem of encryption in wireless channels in a comprehensive way that considers all of the factors in its structure (error performance, security and complexity). New encryption algorithms are proposed, which are modifications to the standardized encryption algorithms and are shown to outperform the use of these algorithms in wireless channels in terms of security and error performance with a slight addition in the complexity. We introduce new modifications that improve the error performance for a certain required security level while achieving the highest possible throughput. We show how our proposed algorithm outperforms the use of other encryption algorithms in terms of the error performance, throughput, complexity, and is secure against all known encryption attacks. In addition, we study the effect of each round and s-box in symmetric encryption algorithms on the overall probability of correct reception at the receiver after encryption and the effect on the security is analyzed as well. Moreover, we perform a complete security, complexity and energy consumption analysis to evaluate the new developed encryption techniques and procedures. We use both analytical computations and computer simulations to evaluate the effectiveness of every modification we introduce in our proposed designs.

Concentration/Emphasis

Emphasis: Electrical Engineering

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.