Evaluating the Impact of Cryptographic Algorithms on Network Performance

Introduction

The rapid growth in the development of complex cryptographic algorithms coupled with the variety and volume of data traversing the global network in a distributed systems environment raises the issue of network performance (Unal et al., 2021). Cryptographic algorithms are methods used to ensure confidentiality, authenticity, and data integrity (Kumari, 2017). Cryptographic algorithms enable secure data communication over public insecure networks (Rojasree & Gnanajayanthi, 2020) by hiding the original information from the intruder (Pal, Datta, & Karmakar, 2022). Though cryptographic algorithms enhance network security (Makarenko et al., 2020; Jing et al., 2014), cryptographic operations consume substantial amounts of computing resources (Patil et al., 2016). This leads to significant overhead costs in resource-bounded systems (Braeken, 2022; Laszka, Vorobeychik, & Koutsoukos, 2018), such as in computer networks. Overhead costs are introduced because cryptographic algorithms depend on complex arithmetic computational functions to perform their operations. Therefore, the encryption and decryption time, execution time, running time, key strength, and memory affect the overall performance of the network (Mushtaq et al., 2017).

Besides, the usage of cryptographic methods on computer networks introduces significant communication overhead cost (Braeken, 2022), which includes data throughput, end-to-end delay, data loss, memory usage, and latency (Gueron, 2016). Similarly, communication networks also have computational complexities, inefficient security, reduced throughput, and increased delay (Mohindra & Gandhi, 2021). In this regard, previous works analyse the efficiency of cryptographic algorithms in various contexts. Notable among them are the evaluation of image files with AES (Elhoseny et al., 2020; Shaktawat et al., 2020) and the encryption of text files (Jintcharadze et al., 2021; Pal, Datta, & Karmakar, 2022). Other studies assess the power utilization, different key sizes, CPU utilization time, and the encryption speed of each of the algorithms (Parkar et al., 2021; Fazzat et al., 2020).

These studies focus on a specific data format (image only, text only, video, or audio only) or networks with specified node densities or stand-only systems. However, the overhead performance of these algorithms may differ on networks with different file formats (Zhang & Liu, 2021). This study implements and evaluates popularly used cryptographic algorithms DES, 3DES, and AES to show their overall communication overhead performance with a varying number of nodes with different file formats. Thus, this study aims to find the cryptographic algorithm that can effectively and efficiently utilize network resources. Specifically, this study (a) investigates the impact of DES, 3DES, and AES cryptographic algorithms on throughput, (b) ascertain the effect of the cryptographic algorithms on end-to-end delay, (c) examines the impact of the cryptographic algorithms on latency, (d) investigates the packet delivery ratios of the cryptographic algorithms.