Cryptanalysis of symmetric key algorithms: A comparative study of RC4, 3DES and AES in an ethical hacking context

Abstract

During a period in which cyber-threats continue increasing, assessing the efficiency of cryptography algorithms became significant in protecting critical data in both organization and personal system. The speedy increase of data exchange and digital communication has strengthened the needs for a strong and effective cryptography mechanism to secure crucial data or information from unwanted access. This research depicts a cryptanalysis of the most and widely used key symmetric algorithms which are Triple Data Encryption Standard (3DES), Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), and Rivest Cipher4 (RC4) in the context of ethical hacking. The study aims to assess and make comparison of the algorithms based upon their time efficiency when decryption and encryption processes. VB.Net was utilized in developing the simulation environment in which documents of 2MB was decrypted and encrypted through each algorithm and the execution time was assessed in millisecond. The results of the experiment showed that Advanced Encryption Standard proven to be the fastest algorithm runtime, with an average recording execution time of 62 milliseconds, making the algorithm most time efficient in this study. RC4 closely followed with 64 milliseconds, showing highest speed but due to its known vulnerabilities, has raised a serious concern. In comparison, 3DES depicted the slowest in performance at 107 milliseconds basically because of the algorithm triple round encryption process and high overhead processing. From the ethical hacking viewpoint, these results highlight the trade-off concerning security and speed, giving emphasis on performance only cannot decide the appropriateness of an encryption algorithm. This study determines that even though RC4 depicts quick execution, its weaknesses in security making it inappropriate for modern system security. AES shows potential as the most efficient and reliable choice for time critical and security application, 3DES is practically less in high performance environment. These contribute to better-informed decision-making when selecting cryptographic algorithms for information security.