Comparative Study of Different Symmetric Key
Cryptography Algorithms · 2013
Cryptography is the practice and study of hiding information. Prior to the modern age, cryptography was almost synonymous with encryption i.e. the conversion of information from a readable state to nonsense. In order to avoid unwanted persons being able to read the information, senders retain the ability to decrypt the information. There are three type of Cryptography: Asymmetric-key cryptography, symmetric key cryptography and hashing. Encryption methods in which both the sender and receiver share the same key is referred to as symmetric key cryptography. This thesis provides a fair comparison between three most common symmetric key cryptography algorithms: AES, Twofish, CAST-256 and Blowfish. The comparison takes into consideration the behavior and the performance of the algorithm when different data loads are used, as our main concern here is to study the performance of algorithms under different settings,. The comparison is made on the basis of these parameters: speed, block size, and key size.