Mercurial Cipher: A New Cipher Technique and Comparative Analysis with Classical Cipher Techniques

As the world has made significant progress in the science and technology, it has lead to many changes in the day to day life of an individual, both in his behavior and habits. Earlier men use letters, telegram and radio for communication. Today, these communications have been digitized by use of internet technology, mobile phones, online chatting et al. which has replaced the letters and telegrams. Due to daily advancement in technology many of traditional encryption techniques have become outdated as they suffers from many vulnerabilities. Therefore a new or upgraded version of encryption and ciphering technique is needed. Mercurial Cipher, is a new ciphering technique which is designed by analyzing the flaws, shortcomings and vulnerabilities of existing (XOR cipher etc) and Classical Ciphering techniques (Caesar Cipher, Vigenere Cipher, Rail Fence Cipher et a1). The main idea is to solve the problem of key management as most of the ciphering technique are based on the key and it is the most vulnerable part of any encrypted message and if attacker comes to know about the keys message could easily be retrieved. It totally defeats the aim of achieving security. So, in this Encryption technique, sender’s machine information has been incorporated, so that the original message makes sense to its intended receiver and knows from where the message has come from.