A Comparative Study of Some Traditional and Modern Cryptographic Techniques

In the era of Internet and networks applications with the attendant prevalence of virus attacks, and intrusion of various kinds and intensities, information security has become a major challenge. There is a demand for stronger encryption techniques which are very hard to crack. The role of cryptography in the field of network security has become very pivotal. There are a wide range of cryptographic algorithms that are used for securing networks. There are also continuous research efforts to formulate new cryptographic algorithms aimed at evolving more advanced techniques for more secured communication. This work analyses some cryptographic techniques based on programming approaches and performances using certain criteria such as the block size, key length, and encryption time and security issues. Blowfish technique was found to offer a better performance compared to AES and RSA in terms of average encryption time. However, DES and Blowfish share the smallest block size of 64 bit while DES has the least key length of 56 bit