Analyzing the Security and Performance Trade-offs of Common Symmetric Encryption Algorithms in Communication Systems

With the proliferation of communication applications, security has become a critical concern for the transmission and storage of files. Encryption is required to protect data communication in computer networks. Asymmetric encryption has the disadvantage of high computational complexity, making it unsuitable for resource-constrained communication applications. The main advantage of symmetric encryption is its lower computational cost compared with asymmetric encryption. However, existing symmetric algorithms vary significantly in efficiency and security, necessitating comparative analysis to determine their practical applicability.

Therefore, it is necessary to evaluate the performance of common symmetric encryption algorithms to establish their suitability for various efficiency and security requirements. This study assessed the performance of three symmetric encryption techniques: Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Data Encryption Standard (DES), and Blowfish for the security of plaintext files, and the simulation program was implemented using the Python programming language.

The avalanche effect, execution time, and throughput performance of AES, DES, and Blowfish were evaluated based on 0.5MB, 1MB, 2MB, 5MB, 10MB, and 20MB of text files. A key novelty of this study lies in the systematic comparison of these algorithms under uniform conditions across file sizes to evaluate their real-world suitability.

The novelty of this research lies in its systematic, file-size-based comparative evaluation of symmetric encryption algorithms using uniform testing conditions. By employing consistent implementation methods and benchmarking metrics, this study offers practical insights into how these algorithms perform under real-world data loads, providing developers and system designers with a valuable tool for selecting the most appropriate encryption algorithm for their specific use cases.

AES performed better than DES and Blowfish algorithms for security performance, while Blowfish performed better for both time and throughput.