Highly Secure AES with Key Generation Using SHA-256 Hash Function
Maniyar Mohammed Saqlain, Ramachandran Sakthivel · 2025
In the modern cryptography world, data is being continuously encrypted and decrypted when it is being transferred or stored in databases so that no one can attack the original data for security purposes. There are a lot of encryption and decryption algorithms designed in previous days to increase the security, but to secure data in advanced computing power and cryptanalysis techniques The Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm was used and made it prove the data is being more secure compared to previously designed algorithms due to its symmetricity, flexibility in having multiple key sizes and versatility in file encryption, image encryption and network security protocols. Its security relies on the key size used in the algorithm for encryption and decryption. In this paper we are integrating Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-256) with AES for adding an extra security and barrier layer for the key used by AES. SHA is a part of the SHA-2 family where multiple hashing functions come under it. Hashing is the process of increasing the security of the system by hashing the data so that it can be prevented from brute-force attacks, which are very common in the hardware world. This process will include randomness and increase key entropy. This approach won’t affect the performance of AES and will also make it the better option for securing the data in the modern cryptographic world.