Comparative Analysis of AES, Blowfish, Twofish, Salsa20, and ChaCha20 for Image Encryption

TL;DR

This paper compares the performance of AES, Blowfish, Twofish, Salsa20, and ChaCha20 in image encryption, highlighting ChaCha20's superior speed and identifying the most efficient algorithms for data security.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of five cryptographic algorithms for image encryption, focusing on processing time and throughput, which is a novel performance evaluation in this context.

Findings

ChaCha20 is over 50% faster in encryption and decryption.

Twofish has lower throughput compared to other algorithms.

ChaCha20 shows the best average time performance.

Abstract

Nowadays, cybersecurity has grown into a more significant and difficult scientific issue. The recog-nition of threats and attacks meant for knowledge and safety on the internet is growing harder to detect. Since cybersecurity guarantees the privacy and security of data sent via the Internet, it is essential, while also providing protection against malicious attacks. Encrypt has grown into an an-swer that has become an essential element of information security systems. To ensure the security of shared data, including text, images, or videos, it is essential to employ various methods and strategies. This study delves into the prevalent cryptographic methods and algorithms utilized for prevention and stream encryption, examining their encoding techniques such as advanced encryp-tion standard (AES), Blowfish, Twofish, Salsa20, and ChaCha20. The primary objective of this re-search is to identify the optimal times and throughputs (speeds) for data encryption and decryption processes. The methodology of this study involved selecting five distinct types of images to com-pare the outcomes of the techniques evaluated in this research. The assessment focused on pro-cessing time and speed parameters, examining visual encoding and decoding using Java as the pri-mary platform. A comparative analysis of several symmetric key ciphers was performed, focusing on handling large datasets. Despite this limitation, comparing different images helped evaluate the techniques' novelty. The results showed that ChaCha20 had the best average time for both encryp-tion and decryption, being over 50% faster than some other algorithms. However, the Twofish algo-rithm had lower throughput during testing. The paper concludes with findings and suggestions for future improvements.