Evaluating Performance of Symmetric Encryption Algorithms

The security of information being stored and transmitted is paramount in today's world. Many efficient encryption standards exist for securing classified data from cyber threats. Two common types of encryption algorithms are classified as Symmetric and Asymmetric. With Symmetric encryption, the same key/password is used to cipher and decipher data whereas with Asymmetric algorithms, we have different key/passwords for encryption and decryption. Symmetric algorithms tend to be less complicated than Asymmetric and hence are more widely used. In this paper, we evaluate and compare the performance between the universally used Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Blowfish algorithms. The execution time is measured for different types of data string values. The length of the string as well as ASCII value range is also varied.