International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering

Abstract

Security can be provided at different levels using different settings with different security algorithms, which can consume different levels of energy. The security settings can be different in many factors, but the main factors are the choice of ciphers used to provide security functions, the key length, and the number of operational rounds, packet size, and data types. These factors also have a significant impact on the energy consumption for providing security. A security algorithm is a function that is commonly used to provide security services such as encryption and message authentication. Many ciphers have been created, but only few are known to be strong and secure, which means no loophole or backdoor is known. The study of the energy consumption of the encryption schemes in wireless devices is essential in design of energy efficient security protocols. The major contributions of this paper are energy-security trades off then, some suggestions for design of secure communications systems. This paper provides evaluation of six of the most common encryption algorithms namely: AES (Rijndael), DES, 3DES, RC2, Blowfish, and RC6. A comparison has been conducted for those encryption algorithms at different settings for each algorithm such as different sizes of data blocks, different data types, battery power consumption, different key size and finally encryption/decryption speed.