Author : Mahak

The principal goal leading the design of any encryption algorithm must be security against unauthorized attacks. An Algorithm is considered computationally secure if it cannot be fragmented with standard resources, either current or future. For any encryption algorithm, performance and the implementation’s cost must be considered before its realization. Other important issues to be considered in performance evaluation of encryption standards are its execution time, memory requirements and hardware or software needs. A data encryption algorithm would not be of much use if it is secure enough but slow in performance as some real-world applications of encryption algorithms include e-banking, online purchasing, share market and online transaction processing applications. In this paper, the four of the popular secret key encryption standards, i.e., DES, 3DES, AES, IDEA and a new encryption approach BEST have been implemented, and their performance is compared by encrypting input files of varying texts and sizes. Based on all experiments, it is concluded that BEST algorithm proves the most optimal encryption standard for textual data.

Keywords: AES, BEST, Cryptography algorithms, DES, Decryption, Encryption, IDEA, Triple-DES.

Article published in International Journal of Current Engineering and Technology, Vol.6, No.3 (June-2016)