Performance differences in encryption software versus storage devices

This thesis looked at three encryption applications that all use the symmetric encryption algorithms AES, Twofish and Serpent but differ in their implementation and how this difference would illustrate itself in performance benchmarks depending on the type of storage device that they were used on. Three mechanical hard drives and one solid state drive were used in the performance benchmarks which measured a variety of different disk operations across the three encryption applications and their algorithms. From the benchmarks performance charts were produced which showed that DiskCryptor had the best performance when using a solid state drive and that TrueCrypt had the best performance when using mechanical hard drives. By choosing DiskCryptor as the encryption application when using a solid state drive a performance increase of 38.9% compared to BestCrypt and 28.4% compared to TrueCrypt was achieve when using the AES algorithm. It was also shown that Twofish was overall the best performing algorithm. The primary conclusion that can be drawn from this thesis is that it is important to choose the right encryption application depending on the type of storage device used in order to get the best performance possible