A Comprehensive Evaluation of Cryptographic Algorithms: DES, 3DES, AES, RSA and Blowfish

Abstract

In today's internet era, with online transactions almost every second and terabytes of data being generated everyday on the internet, securing information is a challenge. Cryptography is an integral part of modern world information security making the virtual world a safer place. Cryptography is a process of making information unintelligible to an unauthorized person. Hence, providing confidentiality to genuine users. There are various cryptographic algorithms that can be used. Ideally, a user needs a cryptographic algorithm which is of low cost and high performance. However, in reality such algorithm which is a one stop solution does not exist. There are several algorithms with a cost performance trade off. For example, a banking application requires utmost security at high cost and a gaming application sending player pattern for analytics does not bother much about security but needs to be fast and cost effective. Thus, amongst the cryptographic algorithms existing, we choose an algorithm which best fits the user requirements. In, this process of choosing cryptographic algorithms, a study of strengths, weakness, cost and performance of each algorithm will provide valuable insights. In our paper, we have implemented and analyzed in detail cost and performance of popularly used cryptographic algorithms DES, 3DES, AES, RSA and blowfish to show an overall performance analysis, unlike only theoretical comparisons.