Ambiguous Multi-Symmetric Scheme and Applications

This paper introduces and evaluates the performance of a novel cipher scheme, Ambiguous Multi-Symmetric Cryptography (AMSC), which conceals multiple coherent plain-texts in one cipher-text. The cipher-text can be decrypted by different keys to produce different plain-texts. Security analysis showed that AMSC is secure against cipher-text only and known plain-text attacks. AMSC has the following applications: 1) it can send multiple messages for multiple receivers through one cipher-text; 2) it can send one real message and multiple decoys for camouflage; and 3) it can send one real message to one receiver using parallel processing. Performance comparison with leading symmetric algorithms (DES, AES and RC6) demonstrated AMSC’s efficiency in execution time.