International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887)
Volume 44– No11, April 2012
23
Superiority of Blowfish Algorithm in Wireless Networks
Gurjeevan Singh
H.O.D - E.C.E
S.B.S.C.E.T, Poly Wing
Ferozepur
Ashwani Kr. Singla
H.O.D - E.C.E
G.T.B.K.I.E.T, Chappianwali
Malout
K.S. Sandha
Assistant Prof.
Deptt. Of E.C.E.
Thapar University , Patiala
ABSTRACT
Encryption algorithm plays a crucial role in information
security which guarantees the recent growing internet and
network applications. They are used to secure the data in
wireless networks against malicious attacks but securing data
also consumes resources such as C.P.U time, Memory, battery
power, encryption time etc. In this paper, we evaluated the
performance of four symmetric key encryption algorithms;
AES, DES, 3DES and Blowfish which commonly used for
data encryption in terms of encryption time, decryption time
& throughput. In this research, we evaluated encryption time,
decryption time and throughput for all four encryption
algorithms in Visual Basic’s environment using large size text
data (.doc). Experimental results show that Blowfish
encryption algorithm may be more suitable for wireless
networks. Study reveals that Blowfish gives better
performance than AES, DES and 3DES in terms of encryption
time, decryption time & throughput.
Keywords
AES, Blowfish, DES, Encryption Algorithm, Security.
1. INTRODUCTION
Cryptography is a science of information security. It is the art
of protecting the data. It stores and transmits the information
safely over the insecure medium like Internet by encoding text
data into a form non recognizable format with the help of
various encryption algorithms and only the intended user will
be able to convert it into original text. The process which
converts original data into the unreadable form is called
encryption process. The encrypted data is called cipher text.
The reverse of data encryption is data decryption which
converts the cipher text back into the original text. Original
text is also called plain text. Cryptology is a combination of
Cryptography (encryption) and cryptanalysis (decryption).
Cryptography algorithms are classified as: Symmetric (private
key) algorithm and asymmetric (public key) algorithm. In
symmetric algorithms uses only one key for encrypt the data
and same for decrypt the data. Asymmetric key algorithm uses
two keys, one is used to encrypt the data and other is used to
decrypt the data. Length of Key has an important place in
Symmetric key encryption [1]. For the same algorithm,
encryption using longer key is hard to cryptanalyze means
more secure as compared to the one using shorter key.
Asymmetric encryption techniques are almost one-thousand
times slower than symmetric techniques as they require more
computational processing power [2].
2. RESEARCH BACKGROUND
To give more perspectives of the performance of the
compared algorithms this section discusses the results
obtained from other resources:
Diaa Salama et.al (2011) paper presents a performance
evaluation of selected symmetric encryption algorithms on
power consumption for wireless devices. The selected
algorithms are AES, DES, RC6, Blowfish, RC2 and 3DES.
There is insignificant difference between open key
authentications and shared key authentication in ad hoc
Wireless LAN connection with excellent signals. In case of
poor signal it is found that, transmission time increased
minimum by 70 % over open sheered authentication in ad hoc
mod.
Simar Preet Singh et.al (2011) study reveals that Blowfish has
better performance than other commonly used encryption
algorithms. Since Blowfish has not any known security weak
points so far, it can be considered as an excellent standard
encryption algorithm. AES showed poor performance results
compared to other algorithms, since it requires more
processing power.
M. Umaparvathi et.al (2010) discussed the comparison of the
most commonly used symmetric encryption algorithms AES
(Rijndael), DES, 3DES and Blowfish in terms of power
consumption. A comparison has been conducted for those
encryption algorithms at different data types like text, image,
audio and video. Results showed that AES has a better
performance than other common encryption algorithms used.
Since AES has not any known security Weak points so far,
this makes it an excellent candidate to be considered as a
standard encryption algorithm. 3DES showed poor
performance results compared to other algorithms since it
requires more processing power.
Tingyuan Nie et.al (2010) discussed the performance of two
symmetric key encryption algorithms: DES and Blowfish
which commonly used for network data encryption. In this
paper, they analyzed encryption security, evaluated encryption
speed and power consumption for both algorithms.
Experimental results show that Blowfish algorithm runs faster
than DES, while the power consumption is almost the same. It
is proved that Blowfish algorithm maybe more suitable for
wireless network which exchanges small size packets.
Allam Mousa et.al (2006) paper Analyzing the RC4
parameters have shown that the speed of encryption or
decryption time is directly related to the encryption key length
and to the data file size if the data is large enough. Data type
is also important since image data requires larger time to be
processed than text or sound data mainly due to the larger file
size. This relationship had been converted into equations to