Performance Comparison of Symmetric Algorithms for SMS Communication

Abstract: A popular way for mobile phone users to send and receive simple text messages is Short Message Service (SMS). A secure communication channel and environment for confidential data transmission is missing in the literature for SMS; therefore it is desirable to secure SMS by additional encryption. Encryption algorithms differ from one another by their ability to identify &prevent the valuable data against data hack attacks and their speed and efficiency in doing securing data. This study provides a performance comparison between the best symmetric encryption algorithms for usage in SMS communication: Blowfish and RC4 (Rivest Cipher 4)). The comparison analysis ran on parameters: size of text data, encryption time, decryption time, encryption throughput, decryption throughput, average encryption time and average decryption time. Based on analysing the criteria�s for efficient way of securing SMS, performance analysis of these algorithms under different parameters and input features is provided in the conclusion section.

Keywords: Cryptography, Decryption, Encryption, Blowfish, RC4.