Evaluation of computing resources consumption of selected symmetric-key algorithms

Data security is becoming more important as data driven activities rose to cloud computing and big data. This concept been addressed using various computing devices and methods including encryption algorithms. Despite the benefit of various encryption methods, limited computing resources and time have hindered the deployment of data security through encryption. This study is aimed at evaluating performance of common existing symmetric-key encryption algorithms namely: Advance Encryption Standard (AES)/Rijndael, Blowfish, Data Encryption Standard (DES), International Data Encryption Algorithms (IDEA) and Rivest Ciphers-4 (RC 4) on Electronic medical record (EMR) data. Basically, the online database that was given particular attention in this research was the software Open Medical Record System (OpenMRS). The evaluation was carried out on local server and data from open MRS data source. The data were structured in an interval of 500 EMR, and ending in 5,000. In each case, processing time, CPU consumption, and power consumption were evaluated as performance measure for the five selected symmetric-keys encryption algorithms. Results obtained from the selected symmetric encryption keys showed that Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is the most efficient having expended minimum amount of computing resource and time to complete task.Keywords: Asymmetric-key, Cryptography, Electronic Medical Records (EMR), Encryption, Decryption, Security, Symmetric-ke