Performance Analysis of RC6, Twofish and Rijndael Block Cipher Algorithms

Abstract

In this paper, Performance analysis of RC6, Twofish and Rijndael block cipher algorithms have been done on the basis of execution time and resource utilization. CPU utilization and memory utilization both are considered for determining resource utilization. These algorithms are parameterized algorithm and were designed to meet the requirements of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) competition and selected among five finalists of that competition. These three algorithms have a variable block size and a variable key size in their structure and encrypt four w-bits at a time. Allowable choices for w are 16 bits, 32 bits, and 64 bits. Twofish and Rijndael have same structure for encryption and decryption while RC6 have different. RC6, Twofish and Rijndael have 20, 16 and 10 rounds respectively. Performances of these three algorithms have been evaluated on key size of 128-bits, 192-bit and 256-bit in this paper. General Terms Cryptography, Block cipher, Symmetric encryption, RC6, Twofish, Rijndael