Hill Cipher Modification: A Simplified Approach

Most people nowadays are using the internet as a means of communication to facilitate exchanging sensitive data. Securing this data is vital considering almost all computers in the world are interconnected. Cryptography is a mechanism of sending information in the masked form so that only the intended receiver can retrieve and read this information. In connection with this, data encryption turns out to be an essential part of the secure communication of this important information. In this paper, a simplified method of encryption of data in blocks using the logical XOR and shift operations, and Radix64 for encoding and decoding the data is introduced. The results confirm that the security of the cipher improves to 53% avalanche effect percentage based on the actual experiment.