An efficient and secure compression technique for data protection using burrows-wheeler transform algorithm

M Baritha Begum; N Deepa; Mueen Uddin; Rajesh Kaluri; Maha Abdelhaq; Raed Alsaqour

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e17602

An efficient and secure compression technique for data protection using burrows-wheeler transform algorithm

Heliyon. 2023 Jun 23;9(6):e17602. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e17602. eCollection 2023 Jun.

Authors

M Baritha Begum¹, N Deepa², Mueen Uddin³, Rajesh Kaluri⁴, Maha Abdelhaq⁵, Raed Alsaqour⁶

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Saranathan College of Engineering, Tiruchirapalli, 620012, Tamil Nadu, India.
² Department of Computer Science, School of Engineering & Technology, Pondicherry University, Karaikal Campus, Karaikal, 609605, Puducherry UT, India.
³ College of Computing and Information Technology, University of Doha for Science and Technology, Doha, 24449, Qatar.
⁴ School of Information Technology and Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology, India.
⁵ Department of Information Technology, College of Computer and Information Sciences, Princess Nourah Bint Abdulrahman University, P.O. Box 84428, Riyadh, 11671, Saudi Arabia.
⁶ Department of Information Technology, College of Computing and Informatics, Saudi Electronic University, 93499, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Abstract

Data stored on physical storage devices and transmitted over communication channels often have a lot of redundant information, which can be reduced through compression techniques to conserve space and reduce the time it takes to transmit the data. The need for adequate security measures, such as secret key control in specific techniques, raises concerns about data exposure to potential attacks. Encryption plays a vital role in safeguarding information and maintaining its confidentiality by utilizing a secret key to make the data unreadable and unalterable. The focus of this paper is to tackle the challenge of simultaneously compressing and encrypting data without affecting the efficacy of either process. The authors propose an efficient and secure compression method incorporating a secret key to accomplish this goal. Encoding input data involves scrambling it with a generated key and then transforming it through the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT). Subsequently, the output from the BWT is compressed through both Move-To-Front Transform and Run-Length Encoding. This method blends the cryptographic principles of confusion and diffusion into the compression process, enhancing its performance. The proposed technique is geared towards providing robust encryption and sufficient compression. Experimentation results show that it outperforms other techniques in terms of compression ratio. A security analysis of the technique has determined that it is susceptible to the secret key and plaintext, as measured by the unicity distance. Additionally, the results of the proposed technique showed a significant improvement with a compression ratio close to 90% after passing all the test text files.

Keywords: Burrows-wheeler transform; Encryption; Keyed scrambling; Move-to-front transform; Run-length encoding (RLE).