An Empirical Evaluation of Encryption and Decryption Times on Block Cipher Techniques

The significant majority of individuals in today's technology environment use the Internet for various purposes. Most often, data sent via the Internet contains private or confidential information that people desire to keep private. As a result, a variety of encryption techniques are extensively used and accessible in information security. Encryption techniques are used to handle different file types or formats over the Internet. This study examines the encryption and decryption times of 3DES, Twofish, and AES utilizing various file formats and constant block sizes of 128 bits. Moreover, the study examined the effectiveness of Blowfish by analyzing its performance with varying key sizes of 128, 192, and 256 bits, while maintaining a fixed block size of 64 bits. However, no study has examined various key bit sizes utilizing a constant block size on these algorithms with diverse file types in more depth up to this point. Cryptographic methods have the drawback of using a lot of computational resources, including CPU time, memory, and battery power. The study analyzed various symmetric encryption algorithms, namely AES, Twofish, 3DES, and Blowfish, and their performance for encrypting and decrypting data files with fixed block sizes. AES's 256 key bit size was determined to be the best for encrypting while using key sizes of 192 and 256 bits can enhance decryption speed. In the case of Blowfish, the 256-key-bit size was found to be more efficient than its 128 and 192-bit counterparts, particularly when dealing with a block size of 64 bits. To enhance the speed of both encryption and decryption processes, the study recommends the utilization of key bit sizes of 192 and 256. The results show that Blowfish can match the encryption and decryption speeds of AES.