Evaluating the Effects of Symmetric Cryptography Algorithms on Power Consumption for Different Data Types

As the importance and the value of exchanged data over the Internet or other media types are increasing, the search for the best solution to offer the necessary protection against the data thieves’ attacks. Encryption algorithms play a main role in information security systems. On the other side, those algorithms consume a significant amount of computing resources such as CPU time, memory, and battery power. But Resources in the wireless environment are limited. There is limited battery power available. Technologies such as CPU and memory are increasing and so is their need for power, but battery technology is increasing at a much slower rate, forming a “battery gap”. Because of this, battery capacity plays a major role in the usability of the devices. The increasing demand for services on wireless devices has pushed technical research into finding ways to overcome these limitations. This paper provides evaluation of six of the most common encryption algorithms namely: AES (Rijndael), DES, 3DES, RC2, Blowfish, and RC6. We examine a method for analyzing trade-offs between energy and security. We suggest approach to reduce the energy consumption of security protocols. 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.