Transmitted Data Encryption Using RC4 Algorithm Via Proposed Multi-tier Infrastructure Environment

Abstract

In this paper, the goal is to design and implement secure web site via two stages. The first stage is selecting the multi-tier architecture in infrastructure of network designing, this stage leads to prevent the direct access to database and increase the level of security since the middle tier (application server) will be receive the client's requests then interact with the last tier (database) to pass the results into client without direct accessing from client to database. The second stage is encrypting of transmitted data from the application server to client via using RC4 algorithm, this stage provides data secrecy or confidentiality to secure the transmission process of information through these tiers. This stage acts the core of this paper because all users of internet wants to get secure transmission of their information. RC4 algorithm is used in this work because it has been used as the data encryption algorithm for many applications and protocols. RC4 algorithm is widely used in security software based on stream cipher including one in the encryption of traffic to and from secure web sites such as Transport Layer Security (TLS), Secure Socket Layer (SSL), and Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) implementations. RC4 algorithm is fast in comparison to other algorithms and it has a simple design hardware implementation. So,RC4 algorithm is five times faster than Data Encryption Standard (DES) and fifteen times faster than Triple-DES. The software requirements for this work are Windows 7, Adobe Dreamweaver CS6, Wampserver 2.2, PHP 5.2.9, Apache 2.2.22 and MySQL 5.5.24. the hardware requirements for this work are CPU (Intel(R) Celeron 1.732GHz for client, Intel(R) Dual-Core 2GHz for server and Intel(R) Core i5 2.4 GHz for database ) and RAM (1GB for client, 4GB for server and 8GB for database ).

Keywords: Security, Data Encryption, RC4, multi-tier architecture, server.