Cryptography has become a basic requirement in this age of global electronic connectivity to secure data storage and transmission against the possibility of message eavesdropping and electronic fraud. In this paper, we use CELLULAR AUTOMATA (CA) to design a symmetric key cryptography system based on Vernam cipher. We use two-dimensional, 128-state, nonuniform CA to generate random ASCII characters; we use the generated random characters to construct a text key (a key that contains letters and/or digits and/or symbols) that can be used in the data encryption/decryption process.
Cryptography, Cellular automata, Random number generators, Vernam cipher, Genetic algorithms
