Performance evaluation of cryptographic algorithms: DES and AES

With the fast progression of digital data exchange in electronic way, information security is becoming much more important in data storage and transmission. Cryptography has come up as a solution which plays a vital role in information security system against malicious attacks. This security mechanism uses some algorithms to scramble data into unreadable text which can be only being decoded or decrypted by party those possesses the associated key. These algorithms consume a significant amount of computing resources such as CPU time, memory and computation time. In this paper two most widely used symmetric encryption techniques i.e. data encryption standard (DES) and advanced encryption standard (AES) have been implemented using MATLAB software. After the implementation, these techniques are compared on some points. These points are avalanche effect due to one bit variation in plaintext keeping the key constant, avalanche effect due to one bit variation in key keeping the plaintext constant, memory required for implementation and simulation time required for encryption.