The Repository @ St. Cloud State

Open Access Knowledge and Scholarship

Date of Award

12-2016

Culminating Project Type

Starred Paper

Degree Name

Information Assurance: M.S.

Department

Information Assurance and Information Systems

College

Herberger School of Business

First Advisor

Dennis Guster

Second Advisor

Susantha Herath

Third Advisor

Balasubramanian Kasi

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Keywords and Subject Headings

Encryption, Decryption, Test-Bed, Processing Overhead, Cryptosystem, Swing

Abstract

Data security is one of the most pressing issues faced by the organizations today. Unauthorized access to confidential information corresponding to employees/customers like SSN (Social Security numbers), financial information, health records, birth dates can be compromised both to the individual customers involved and the company withholding the data. The problem has become immense, approximately 260 million records were compromised since 2005 and companies, states and countries have reacted by mandating that industries should stringently follow the best security practices, including encryption and decryption of data. Also, the costs associated with data threats are quite increasing (Whitfield & Susan, 2007). Businesses that use strong encryption methodologies in their mobile devices, computers, cloud systems, other locations might not gain 100 % protection from dangerous hackers, but they can decrease their vulnerability to such attacks and thereby the potential of financial losses. Data encryption is the method of converting data in a computer or any communication system making it unintelligible in a way that the data can be reversed only by the authorized people accessing the original data. The primary goal is to safeguard the confidentiality of data, but integrity checks are also provided by the technique in various forms of authentication message codes. For instance, digital signature schemes are also fundamentals of encryption. The purpose of it is to ensure the authenticity of the identity of the receiver and sender. With an increasing awareness of security threats, many of the current companies are using cryptographic techniques for ensuring data security. Many of the companies like Amazon, Apple, AT&T and Comcast are using encryption techniques for securing the information. While there are a many encryption and decryption techniques available today, there is an obvious requirement for the current companies to find and choose the best reliable cryptographic techniques for securing their data. A performance test of various algorithms is needed to bring up the best technique. This research paper deals with the implementation of different cryptographic algorithms with a programming language called JAVA. It involves designing a graphical user interface (GUI) where sample input can be entered, common algorithms used to encrypt and decrypt the input can be selected. A mechanism for building a test bed for comparing the performances of the implemented algorithms is designed to calculate the encryption processing overhead.

Comments/Acknowledgements

Dr. Guster helped me in choosing my topic of interest, Dr. Herath assisted me in putting all the concepts in an appropriate manner into this research paper in proper format.

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