HexE -- Securing Audio Contents in Voice Chat using Puzzle and Timestamp

Abstract

Cryptography is the study of securing information. It is the physical process that scrambles the information by rearrangement and substitution of content, so that it becomes difficult for anyone to understand. In today's world, security has become an inevitable part of our day-to-day life, right from normal browsing to performing critical payment transactions. Hackers work endlessly to break the security present in the apps/websites on which we perform day-to-day operations and salvage valuable information. Because of this, many illegal activities have taken place which affect the user. One such illegal activity is tapping the voice communication between two users. If left unencrypted, the communication between the users is compromised, thereby causing issues. One way to prevent this act is to encrypt the audio in that the contents cannot have tampered with unless the receiver has the valid key to decrypt it. The proposed solution termed "HexE" aims to create a puzzle-based algorithm which would encrypt and decrypt the audio files without manipulating the file header, thus securing the contents. The algorithm works on an NxN SuDoKu-based puzzle which is accepted both by the sender and receiver. Using the timestamp of the event (UNIX based), a grid from the puzzle is chosen which in turn will act as the key for both encryption and decryption. If the timestamp is slightly adjusted, the process will end up in failure during decryption, thus ensuring confidentiality. Another approach to secure the audio files is to implement IPFS (Inter Planetary File System) alongside the puzzle algorithm in which the encrypted audio is stored on it and the receiver can fetch the audio provided if the valid IPFS Hash of the file is present. In this way, the audio file is secured.