Piecewise symmetric magic cube: application to text cryptography

This article propounds a Piecewise Symmetric Magic Cube (PSMC), the properties of which have reinvigorated its application to text encryption. A method has been introduced for the construction of magic cubes of order m x 2(l), for all l,m (m even) is an element of N boolean OR{0}, m >= 4 by using the concept of compounding. The behavior of elements in PSMC is controlled by the starting variables (S-start and L-start). The formula for evaluation of the magic sum of these magic cubes have been derived, which ensures magic nature of PSMC. Additionally, PSMC are applied to the field of text cryptography. The proposed text encryption model is applicable for the encryption and decryption of any language that may include numeric digits, and special characters along with their different combinations. Also, the validation of this model has been checked by focusing on the analysis of bilingual data (English-German, English-Hindi, German-Hindi, French-Arabic, and Italian-Spanish). The performance evaluation metrices (brute-force analysis, avalanche effect, CPU time analysis, Shannon entropy, and known plain text analysis) have been carried to analyze the resisting efficiency of the proposed model against different types of attacks. An analysis of encryption/ decryption time shows that decryption is more time-efficient which protects the data from getting being corrupted by the intruders. The distinct entries of PSMC remove the problem of repetition in cipher text which raises the level of security to a higher extent.