ABSTRACT

The explosive growth of information, places a high demand for Information Security. Information Security deals with securing the information from unauthorized access or misuse of information either intentionally or accidentally. Information may be represented in many forms like text, documents, audio, video, images or maps. The standard and widely used form is documents. The objective of our work is to secure information present in these documents especially in a shared environment like peer-to- peer environment. We have proposed a novel symmetric encryption method which uses XOR based extended key to encrypt all characters which includes alphabets, numerals and special characters. Our approach differs from traditional approaches which rely on numeric key values. [6], [1]. Our intention is to strengthen the confusion which inherently makes the decryption a challenging task.