A Modification on Rivest Cipher (RC4) Algorithm Against FMS Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) Attack

Abstract

The modern communication systems consider the secure informationtransmission as an important condition to judge the successful of them. Therefore,the nowadays research focused on the development the cipher algorithms toovercome the cleared drawbacks. Rivest cipher (RC4) algorithm, adopted by wiredequivalent piracy (WEP) in IEEE802.11 standard as a cryptographic algorithm, is oneof the ciphering methods that suffers from numerous weaknesses. Theseweaknesses include in the algorithm design itself as well as the problem of attachingthe WEP by hackers. As a result, these weaknesses encourage the hackers to attachthe transmission information. In this paper, a modified cipher algorithm is presented,which combines the RC4 and developed version of Hill cipher algorithms. Theobjective of the proposed algorithm is to encrypt the plain textin two levels. Firstly,this text is encrypted utilizing the well-known RC4 and secondly the resultingciphered text is encrypted using the modified Hill algorithm. The output text is theresults of the introduced algorithm of this paper with high security and resiliencyagainst the attaching actions. The proposed algorithm is simulated using C++environment and the achieved results have been compared to the classic RC4. Asuperior performance has been recorded for the proposed algorithm in comparisonwith RC4.