IMPLEMENTATION OF TEXTUAL INFORMATION ENCRYPTION USING 128, 192 AND 256 BITS ADVANCED ENCRYPTION STANDARD ALGORITHM

Individual or organizational sensitive data and information need to be prevented from unauthorized access. Several reports of middle man attacks and intrusion in form of hacking have been reported over the years when data are sent over wired or wireless media. One of the ways to prevent these is to either secure the medium through which information is being sent or to put measures in place to secure the actual information being sent. Though implementing both options could be expensive, however, implementing any of the option could still be effective. This could be achieved by making the data being sent meaningless to a third party but meaningful to the intending recipient. Cryptography is a proven way to achieve this. It entails using certain mathematical techniques to make a data unreadable and meaningless to any other person except the actual recipient who has the key needed to decrypt the encrypted data. Rijndael algorithm; which is the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) for implementing cryptography is presented in this paper. It is a symmetric approach to implementing cryptography as it uses the same key for encryption and decryption. A detailed analysis of its implementation using its various 128, 192 and 256 bits key lengths is presented in this paper. The encryption and decryption process is made more secured by sending the encrypted text to the recipients email while the decryption key is sent to the recipient’s phone number. This is done to prevent instances where the recipients email is hacked. KEYWORDS: Advanced Encryption Standard, Cryptography, Encryption, Decryption, Rijndael algorithm