A Secured Distributed Database System Using Rijndael Encryption Algorithm

Abstract

There is a pressing need to secure distributed database system in order to address effectively some challenges, such as, no encryption of users’ access details in the database, which could be hacked by skilled hands, and also the security of the data is highly and threateningly compromised when using data encryption standard (DES) algorithm. This is because it has weak or semi-weak keys, inability of DES algorithm to eliminate the possibility of equivalent keys due to linearity of the key expansion and it requires high computational machines when encrypting large data and the data encryption is applied only on textual data. This paper aims to develop a secure distributed database system using the Rijndael encryption algorithm, also known as the advanced encryption standard (AES). The primary and secondary sources of research methodologies in gathering data or information were employed and rapid application development (RAD) was adopted as system development methodology. The proposed system employed an approach that uses secured hash algorithm (SHA-3) for encrypting login details of users, Rijndael algorithm to encrypt and re-encrypt text and image data, in order to improve the security strength and make it difficult for unauthorized personnel to have access to data stored in the database. Based on the results of the proposed system, the system has the capability of capturing the user’s details for registration and encrypting the user’s password with SHA-3 algorithm. The user can send encrypted text and/or image data with less amount of time and can also receive encrypted data, decrypt it without any changes in quality of the data. Conclusively, with this system, it is impossible for intruders to gain access to the application or compromise the security of the text or image data and users can share (send and receive) sensitive data/information in a secured manner without any interception.