Privacy is the main concern in today’s world. There are many threats to the integrity of data and can be more harmful if the data is highly confidential. Encrypting the data and adding security layers is a must when dealing with highly confidential information. And for this purpose, using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption-decryption algorithm becomes most important as the AES algorithm is very difficult to crack.
What is Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)?
The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a symmetric block cipher used to protect classified information.There are three block ciphers in AES: AES-128, AES-192 and AES-256. AES-128 uses a 128-bit key length to encrypt-decrypt a block of messages, while AES-192 uses a 192-bit key length and AES-256 uses a 256-bit key length to encrypt-decrypt messages. Each cipher encrypts and decrypts data in blocks of 128 bits using cryptographic keys of 128, 192 and 256 bits. Symmetric, also known as secret key, ciphers use the same key for encrypting and decrypting, so the sender and the receiver must both know and use the same secret key. There are 10 rounds for 128-bit keys, 12 rounds for 192-bit keys and 14 rounds for 256-bit keys. A round consists of several processing steps that include substitution, transposition and mixing of the input plain-text to transform it into the final output of cipher-text. It uses higher length key sizes such as 128, 192 and 256 bits for encryption. Hence it makes AES algorithm more robust against hacking.
What is ProGuard and how it works?
ProGuard is a safe platform for transferring confidential files by encrypting the files and sending them to receiver using AWS instance which is slightly different approach than the current platforms. Here there are two applications: 1) Stand-alone Application and 2) Web Application. The stand-alone application works on local machine for encryption-decryption and securing the files. The web application runs on cloud for the purpose of sending the encoded file and key to the receiver which he can later download the file and key to decode it through stand-alone application.
Pre-requisites
Necessary dependencies for this project:
- Flask
- Pycrypto
- Reportlib
- Secretsharing
- PyPDF2
Below is the step-by-step process for implementing the program to share the files securely:
#privacy #aws #python #security #cryptography