Functional Modification of Advanced Encryption Standard Algorithm by Perturbing the Diffusion and Confusion Properties

Advanced Encryption Standard is the most acceptable and widely used symmetric algorithm. However, cyber attacks and security breaches are becoming very common day by day. Cyber attacks hit businesses all over the world, not only financially but also in the terms of reputation. That is why more robust security measures are needed to protect privacy and prevent data breaches. In this paper, we analyzed the traditional AES algorithm and proposed some enhancements. We modified both the diffusion and confusion section by employing modified key scheduling and cipher rounds. While making the encryption stronger, we did not compromise with the complexity and user-friendliness. Through simulation studies we showed that our modification increased the avalanche effect of the algorithm by 6%, and our proposed algorithm takes 35.23% less time than the original.