Data Compression and Encryption Fusion: A Review of Hybrid Techniques for Secure and Efficient Online Transmission
Lei Zhao, Junhua Deng, Yimin Wang, Yulong Ma, Peng Lu · IEEE Access · 2025
With the exponential growth of digital data, ensuring efficient and secure online file transmission has become a significant challenge. This study presents a comprehensive analysis of hybrid compression-encryption techniques, evaluating their impact on transmission efficiency, computational complexity, and security strength. Various lossless compression methods, including Huffman Coding, Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW), and Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT), are examined alongside encryption schemes such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Rivest Cipher 4 (RC4), and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). The performance of these techniques is assessed based on key metrics, including compression ratio, encryption and decryption time, and security strength. The results indicate that BWT achieves the highest compression ratio of 55% but incurs longer encryption times (20.3 ms), while RC4 provides the fastest encryption speed (8.3 ms) at the cost of lower security strength. ECC, despite its higher encryption time of 18.9 ms, ensures the highest security level. Additionally, this study explores the effects of compression on encryption efficiency, showing that LZW-compressed data reduces encryption time by approximately 20% compared to uncompressed data. The findings provide valuable insights into optimizing hybrid compression-encryption solutions for secure and efficient online data transmission, emphasizing the need for a balanced approach between security, computational efficiency, and data compression.