Performance evaluation of various symmetric encryption algorithms

Abstract

With rise in the use of internet in various fields like banking, military and government sector, the security and privacy of the data has been the main concern. Today, most of the data handling and electronic transactions are done on the internet. When the information is transferred from the sender to the receiver over the internet, it may be eavesdropped by an intruder and thus is a continuous threat to the secrecy or confidentiality of the data. The popular technique that protects the confidentiality of the data is cryptography which converts the plain text into unreadable form and then receiver applies reverse mechanism to decrypt the unreadable form of data to readable form. This mechanism is called as encryption-decryption process. Thus to secure the data over the internet, it is important to find out which algorithm performs better than the other algorithms. In this paper, the different symmetric encryption algorithms like DES, 3DES, AES have been analyzed with respect to different parameters and data types (like text files, image) on i7 processor.