Modified-DES encryption algorithm with improved BER performance in wireless communication

Due to the fact that wireless channels are an open medium to intruders and their attacks, encryption is a vital process to assure security over these channels. However, using well-known encryption algorithms to encrypt data in wireless communication will result in a catastrophic error due to the avalanche effect, which is implemented in these algorithms to assure security. Although this effect is desirable to assure security, these algorithms do not take into account the bit error characteristics of the wireless channel. Therefore, if an error occurs in the encrypted data over the channel, the decryption process at the receiver will result in half the original bits to be in error due to the avalanche effect. So the need for a new secure encryption algorithm that takes into account the bit error characteristics of wireless channels becomes necessary. In this paper, we propose a modification to the Data Encryption Standard (DES) to make it secure and prone to the bit errors caused by the wireless channel. We observe that using the modified algorithm in wireless channels, improves the bit error rate (BER) performance as well as security compared to DES.