Performance Evaluation of Cryptographic Algorithms: DES, 3DES, Blowfish, Twofish, and Threefish

Abstract

With the advancement of the Internet, many individuals and organizations have started to use it to store and send personal or business information. Some of this information is highly confidential and that, in turn, raises an issue of data privacy and confidentiality. Major advances in the Internet have also aided intruders in getting unauthorized access to confidential information. Information Security is the art of securing data from illegitimate access while ensuring integrity, availability, and confidentiality of data. Information Security is achieved through cryptographic encryption and decryption algorithms. Encryption hides confidential information by converting it to an unreadable form while the reverse process of retrieving data from the unreadable or encrypted form is known as decryption. Many cryptographic algorithms exist today and selecting which one to use depends on several factors and measures. This paper conducts a comparison of the encryption speed for five different cryptographic symmetric block-cipher algorithms: DES, 3DES, Blowfish, Twofish, and Threefish. The simulation is done using Python with various text file sizes. The results show that Blowfish outperforms the rest of the algorithms that were tested.