AES, RSA & ECDSA- Simulation based Comparative Analysis of Cryptographic Algorithms

Abstract

Recent growth of Network Applications and Internet has become backbone of communication between millions of people. Security has become a big challenge due to the rise of e-commerce to e-payments to secure communications and protecting of passwords. The importance and the value of the data exchanged over the internet have increased. Any loss or threat to information can prove to be very harmful for the organizations. Hence the necessary protection against the data intruders and attacks along with providing these services reliably and in time is one of the most worked on research field presently. Cryptography is mostly used by all government and semi government intelligence agencies throughout the world for safe transmission of messages in any format online or offline. Cryptographic algorithms play a crucial character in providing security to data against harmful malicious attacks and intruders. The main problem that lies with cryptographic algorithms is that the a lot of resources like CPU time, memory, encryption time etc are consumed. The main characteristic that identifies and differentiates the encryption algorithms from each other is the ability to secure the already protected data against various types of attacks and the speed with which it works along with efficiency in doing so. Normally, symmetric key algorithms are used over asymmetric key algorithms as they are very fast in nature. A data encryption algorithm is not of use if it provides security but shows slow performance due to the common trend of embedding encryption algorithms into other applications such as e-commerce, e-banking and online transaction processing. In this study, the performance of the three of the popular encryption algorithms AES, RSA and ECDSA was compared. First some terms and concepts behind basic cryptographic methods are defined, and then the three algorithms are compared on the basis of these parameters: time and complexity. Simulation program is implemented using NS 2.34.