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Cipher for smart card using Unicode, length and positionKeywords: Cryptography , Encryption , Hash Function , Smart Card Abstract: Smart cards have become a common thing today. Smart cards with various utilities are used today since they are easy to carry and relatively secured. But due to advancement of technologies, smart cards are becoming increasingly insecure. A paper from certain conference suggested a new encryption algorithm to keep the information secured in smart cards and to overcome forgery attacks. It claims that, on an average, even a supercomputer will take 101084 years to decrypt, which is much higher than the previous proposals. It makes use of the length of the PIN, and the position and the Unicode value of every character in the PIN along with a secret key to create cipher text. Also, final cipher text is formed by combining two different cipher texts, one from date and time and another from PIN and secret key. And only this final cipher text is saved on the smart card making this algorithm further more secured. But few anomalies were noticed in it. Firstly, the cipher text generated using proposed formula for encryption makes securing it using position problematic. Secondly, the formula given in actual paper misses an important step, without which decryption process gives wrong output. With proposed changes these problems are eradicated and the algorithm becomes more difficult to hack.
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