Performance Comparison of Various Modes of Advanced Encryption Standard

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the security of various AES encryption modes against quantum threats using a novel NGI metric and empirical analysis with encrypted images.

Contribution

Introduces a normalized Gini impurity (NGI) metric to assess the security of different AES modes through empirical analysis.

Findings

ECB mode shows lower security compared to other modes.

GCM mode provides the highest security among the tested modes.

NGI effectively differentiates security levels of AES modes.

Abstract

With the maturation of quantum computing technology, many cryptographic methods are gradually facing threats from quantum computing. Although the Grover algorithm can accelerate search speeds, current research indicates that the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) method can still enhance security by increasing the length of the secret key. However, the AES method involves multiple modes in implementation, and not all modes are secure. Therefore, this study proposes a normalized Gini impurity (NGI) to verify the security of each mode, using encrypted images as a case study for empirical analysis. Furthermore, this study primarily compares the Electronic Codebook (ECB) mode, Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) mode, Counter (CTR) mode, Counter with CBC-Message Authentication Code (MAC) (CCM) mode, and Galois Counter Mode (GCM).