Performance Evaluation of Encryption Algorithms in Mobile Devices

The use of mobile devices increases rapidly nowadays and the mobile technologies, models and software are changing very fast. Mobile devices are vulnerable to several types of threats from many sources such as applications, mobile device, network and social resources. Several encryption algorithms are available to protect mobile data. This paper presents an evaluation study of encryption algorithm for mobile devices. The study focuses in preserving the confidentiality of mobile data without data availability and considering battery draining issue. The algorithms under study are AES, DES, TEA, RSA and REA. This paper presents two experiments in the evaluation process. The first experiment utilizes the execution time of encrypting 10 files using five encryption algorithms in three mobile devices. The second experiment handle the battery consumption of one mobile device to the same files using the same five encryption algorithms. The experimentation results revealed that AES is the fastest algorithm and REA is the slowest. AES is the least algorithm in battery consumption as it consumes less than 1 mAh to encrypt 20 times 1500 KB files.