Integrated encryption in dynamic arithmetic compression

Abstract A variant of adaptive arithmetic coding is proposed, adding cryptographic features to this classical compression method. The idea is to perform the updates of the frequency tables for characters of the underlying alphabet selectively, according to some randomly chosen secret key K. We give empirical evidence that with reasonably chosen parameters, the compression performance is not hurt, and discuss also aspects of how to improve the security of the system being used as an encryption method. To keep the paper self-contained, we add a short description of the arithmetic coding algorithm that is necessary to understand the details of the new suggested method.