Analyzing Computational Components of Standard Block Encryption Schemes

Encryption is used to secure sensitive computer data which may be at rest or in motion. There are several standard encryption algorithms that have been used to encrypt and protect blocks of sensitive data to ensure confidentiality. The most popular standard block encryption schemes are the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Triple Data Encryption Standard (3DES), and the first standardized encryption scheme, which is no longer the standard scheme now, namely the Data Encryption Standard (DES). AES is the current standard for block encryption used worldwide and is implemented on many processors. In this work, we compare the hardware performance of these three encryption schemes. First, we identified the underlying computational components for these three encryption schemes, and then we analyzed to what extent these computational components were being used in these block encryption schemes to encrypt and decrypt a given message. In this paper, we compared the contribution of these computational components to evaluate the overall encryption efficiency in terms of speed and computational delays for encrypting a given block of data for a given hardware platform. AES was found to be the faster scheme in terms of hardware computation speed in accomplishing the same encryption task compared to the other two block encryption schemes, namely, the DES and 3DES schemes.