Excellence in Research: Parallel Linear Feedback Shift Register Based Encryption on Commodity Systems

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This research is an effort to advance knowledge in computer security as it relates to cellular telecommunications and image encryption. The present digital revolution with the ubiquitous mobile technologies and the surge in social media usage raise serious security challenges. This project is designed to address such challenges. The research will strengthen mobile device communication channels in order to secure conversations, ensure that data is protected from interception, and prevent cellular fraud from occurring. There are two prominent standards for mobile networks in the country, and they are the Global System for Mobile Communications and the Code Division Multiple Access. While the latter is widely used in the United States, the former has become the de-facto standard for global networks with its subscribers surpassing five billion in 2017. It is estimated that this number will increase to 5.7 billion subscribers within the next decade. This rapid growth brings with it security concerns that are addressed in this project through the development and analyses of cost effective and efficient encryption algorithms. The results and findings of the research will be widely disseminated through print media, professional conferences, seminars, and workshops. The software that will be developed from this research project will be made publicly available. Undergraduate students from under-represented minority groups in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics will be exposed to research in information security. Overall, the products from this research will have far reaching benefits to the society in areas of secure mobile communications, image encryption and the development of information security research at Fayetteville State University (a historically black college and one of the seventeen constituent institutions in the University of North Carolina System).Encrypted data transmissions through mobile communication channels are potentially vulnerable to cryptographic attacks since malicious agents may steal confidential information by running algorithms that can break the security of the encrypted data. Secure transfer of data through the combination of encryption and decryption, known as cipher, is the general approach to solving this problem in mobile communications. Specifically, stream ciphers do not suffer from propagation errors compared to other ciphers, and they tend to have better software efficiency. This research is focused on the applications of mobile communications and image encryption for which stream ciphers are often the typical choice. The research will span many aspects of stream ciphers, particularly Linear Feedback Shift Registers-based stream ciphers and their relationships to binary primitive polynomials and matrix operations. The project will include development of comprehensive software libraries written in two prominent computer-programming languages; comparative complexity and security analysis of algorithms that are stream-based; application of Graphics Processing Unit clusters for cryptanalysis of algorithms based on Compute Unified Device Architecture programming; engagement of undergraduate students in authentic research; and building research capacity in information security at Fayetteville State University.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.