International Journal on Recent and Innovation Trends in Computing and Communication ISSN: 2321-8169 Volume: 3 Issue: 6 4301 - 4306 _______________________________________________________________________________________________ 4301 IJRITCC | June 2015, Available @ http://www.ijritcc.org _______________________________________________________________________________________ Critical Analysis of Various Symmetric Key Cryptographic Algorithms Preksha Nema Dept. of Computer Engineering and Applications National Institute of Technical Teachers’ Training and Research Bhopal (M.P), India preksha.nema@gmail.com M.A.Rizvi Dept. of Computer Engineering and Applications National Institute of Technical Teachers’ Training and Research Bhopal (M.P), India marizvi@nitttrbpl.ac.in Abstract—Current era is digital and has elite advancement in technology, almost in every field things are becoming technology friendly. It is the need to provide security to sensitive information in this fast growing technical world. Cryptography is one of the very popular fields of network security that deals with conversion of sensitive data into one which could not be understood by anyone without the secret key. Many researchers has worked in the area of cryptography and developed many algorithms in different period and providing security to the travelling data. It is need to know the strengths and weakness of each algorithm before using and suggesting to anybody to use one. After critically analyzing existing standard cryptographic algorithms on parameters like throughput, power consumption and memory usage on DES, TDES, AES, Blowfish, Twofish, Threefish, RC2, RC4, RC5 and RC6, it has been concluded that which algorithm will suit in which situation. Keywords-Cryptography; Encryption; Decryption; symmetric key encryption; asymmetric key encryption __________________________________________________*****_________________________________________________ I. INTRODUCTION Network security is one of the field of computer technology having its vast dimensions that covers computer (Information) security, network security as well as the internet security. Security is one of the most significant issues to be kept in mind while doing any work that is dependent on computer network. Today in this mobile era of bits and bytes everyone is dependent on technology that uses the computer network and internet.  Computer Security - generic name for the collection of tools designed to protect data from hackers.  Network Security - measures to protect data during transmission.  Internet Security - measures to protect data during Internet access. [1] This Security is the foremost requirement to be fulfilled. As the growth of security measures increases, the attacks on security are also growing proportionally. Intruders and attackers are always finding out opportunity to hack data that is being transmitted. In order to win this war for preserving security, there is the desperate need of some very strong measures against these malicious intruders. Cryptography is one of the most common and fruitful measure against them. In this paper an analysis is done on various cryptographic algorithms with some parameters. Cryptography means secret writing (crypto- means secret and graphy means- writing) as illustrated in figure1. It is having two main processes that are encryption at sender side and decryption at receiver side. Modern cryptography uses mathematical techniques to provide security services and relies upon two basic components [2]:  An Algorithm ( or Cryptographic methodology)  A Cryptographic Key which determines the specifics of algorithm operation. Figure 1: Concept of cryptography A. BASIC TERMINOLOGY  Cryptography: The art or science encompassing the principles and methods of transforming an intelligible message into one that is unintelligible, and then retransforming that message back to its original form  Plaintext: The original intelligible message  Cipher text: The transformed message