Peformance analysis of data encryption algorithms

The principal goal guiding the design of any encryption algorithm must be security against unauthorized attacks. However, for all practical applications, performance and speed are also important concerns. These are the two main characteristics that differentiate one encryption algorithm from another. This paper provides the performance comparison between four of the most commonly used encryption algorithms: DES(Data Encryption Standard), 3DES(Triple DES), BLOWFISH and AES (Rijndael). The comparison has been conducted by running several setting to process different sizes of data blocks to evaluate the algorithms encryption and decryption speed. Based on the performance analysis of these algorithms under different hardware and software platform, it has been concluded that the Blowfish is the best performing algorithm among the algorithms under the security against unauthorized attack and the speed is taken into consideration.