A New Approach to Encryption using Huffman Coding

Abstract

In today’s world, where Digital Communication is becoming an integral part of everyone’s life, cyber security has become a challenge. There are various threats to the data being sent digitally.  Changing the data into an unidentifiable form can protect it from attackers. Cryptography is about constructing protocols to prevent third party interventions. Various cryptographic techniques have been proposed to make the data transfer secure. Symmetric key algorithms are the widely used for encryption. The message to be transferred should be as small as possible so as to reduce space complexity that is why compression techniques find their applications in encryption. In this paper, a new approach to encrypt text files using a mix of Huffman coding, combination of symmetric key and public key cryptography and the binary operator XOR is proposed.