Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Security on the wireless networks is the problem analyzed in this paper based on various symmetric encryption algorithms. This research work is mainly designed to achieve safety measures in wireless network. Symmetrical encrypting algorithms use identical keys for processing. This research works analysis data security based on Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Rivest Cipher (RC4) encryption algorithms on various platforms and calculates the performance based on time and memory consumption. The given text was encrypted and decrypted using various key sizes and concluded that compared with RC4, AES is more secure for both encryption and decryption while data transmission. The research analysis have been carried for 16 byte data and proved that AES is approximately 3 times faster than RC4 algorithm for encryption, similarly the decryption is double that of encryption. The memory space require for AES is more than RC4 because AES consist of more routines to calculate values for each rounds. This helps the users to choose the encryption techniques depending on their environment and the need for data protection while transmission.
Keywords: Authentication, Advanced Encryption Algorithm, Rivest Cipher4, Wireless Security, WEP, WPA