PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF DES AND RSA SUITABILITY FOR DIFFERENT SYSTEM APPLICATIONS

ABSTRACT
This work is based on performance Analysis of DES and RSA suitability for different system applications. The rationale behind the work was to find out how suitable DES (Data Encryption Standard) and RSA (Rivest, Shamir and Adlemen) are for different application systems under different systems requirements. In order to achieve these objectives, an application that implements DES and RSA was developed using object oriented analysis and design (OOAD) approach, and  was implemented in java programming language. The application was used to encrypt and decrypt different file sizes for DES and RSA. The Encryption Execution Time (EET) and Decryption Execution Time (DET) were taken, and throughput was calculated. Also, other parameters like security strength and memory consumption of the two algorithms were gotten from the works reviewed. The work went further to make a comparison based on EET and DET of DES and RSA using generated data. Also, power consumption, memory usage, and security strength of the two algorithms were compared. The result of the analysis shows that DES is faster than RSA, consumes low power than RSA, takes less memory than RSA but weaker in security. While RSA is stronger in security than DES, slower compare to DES, and consumes more power and memory than DES. Therefore DES was judged suitable for applications where speed takes higher priority than security and other requirement while RSA is more suitable for applications where system security takes higher priority than other requirements.