Performance Evaluation of Advanced Encryption Standard Algorithm

Nowadays the confidentiality of information is an issue of primary importance. Generally, confidentiality is obtained by encrypting/decrypting the information with a symmetric algorithm. Currently, the most used and standardized algorithm is the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), but the encryption and decryption usually causes undesired delays in the access to information. As users must necessarily use either AES or another encryption/decryption algorithm to guarantee confidentiality, the implications on performance must always be evaluated. It is very interesting to evaluate the influence of the configuration parameters of AES on performance, in order to select an appropriate configuration. This work provides a performance evaluation methodology to estimate how the configuration of any encryption/decryption algorithm affects the performance. The methodology has been applied to the AES algorithm in five different execution platforms, obtaining useful results for any user of the AES algorithm.