A Comparative Study of Symmetric Key Encryption Algorithms

Internet and networks applications are growing very fast, so the needs to protect such applications are increased. Encryption algorithms play a main role in information security systems. On the other side, those algorithms consume a significant amount of computing resources such as CPU time, memory, and battery power. This paper provides evaluation of five of the most common encryption algorithms namely: AES (Rijndael), DES, 3DES, RC2 and RC6. A comparison has been conducted for those encryption algorithms at different settings for each algorithm such as different sizes of data blocks, battery power consumption, different key size and finally encryption/decryption speed.