A comprehensive performance empirical study of the symmetric algorithms:AES, 3DES, Blowfish and Twofish

Abstract

Developing software applications that provide services in all business fields such as finance, health, education, real estate and social media etc., must maintain various quality attributes, such as security, performance, availability, reliability, scalability, maintainability, usability and so on. If we talk about security for example, then we must take care of couple of properties like confidentiality, integrity, availability, non-repudiation and accountability. To achieve these targets there are different ways, one of them is using cryptographic mechanism. Cryptography has two basic types of algorithms, symmetric and asymmetric. Each of them provides encryption and decryption processes. In this paper, we conducted a performance evaluation between four of the symmetric algorithms AES, 3DES, Blowfish and Twofish. We evaluated the execution time, memory utilization and ciphertext size on the encryption and decryption processes. We performed the comparison against different files size by building a .NET application using C#. By analyzing the result, we noticed that AES has the lowest execution time in encryption and decryption processes, while Twofish has the highest execution time. In the encryption process, AES and 3DES consumes less memory than the blowfish and Twofish and they used very close amount of memory. While AES utilized less memory in the decryption. Finally, Blowfish and Twofish have the biggest ciphertext size.