Healing the Hill Cipher, Improved Approach to Secure Modified Hill against Zero-plaintext Attack

Hill Cipher is a symmetric cryptosystem that was claimed to suffer from known-plaintext attack for many years. Different methods have been proposed to make this cipher more secure against known attacks. The introduced classic Hill cipher by Tourani and Falahati in 2011 that was devised in two variants and based upon affine transformation, was considered to be more secure against known attacks. Recently, this well modified Hill cipher is claimed to be vulnerable to zero-plaintext attack. In this paper, by using a chaotic map and scrambling methods, a novel cryptosystem based on Tourani and Falahati Hill cipher is presented which overcomes the zeroplaintext attack. The proposed Hill cipher is more reliable and faster.