Performance Evaluation and the Impact of File Size on Various AES Encryption Modes

Abstract

Important factors in the system are performance and information security. A secure system does not necessarily have fast performance because it takes time for encryption processing that takes time. For that, the system must use an encryption mode that suits the needs. This study measures the encryption performance of five AES methods, namely AES-ECB, AES-SIV, AES-CBC, AES-EAX, and AES-GCM on text data, and images with sizes of 1KB, 10KB, 100KB, and 1000KB. Performance testing is carried out using the same hardware and software to ensure consistency. From the analysis results, it was found that the AES-ECB (Electronic Codebook) encryption results had the fastest encryption time but sacrificed security because of the data patterns seen in the ciphertext. Meanwhile, AES-SIV (Synthetic Initialization Vector) produced performance that tended to be constant for all file sizes, without sacrificing security against nonce reuse. AES-CBC (Cipher Block Chaining) produced a time that increased as the file size increased. The larger the encrypted file, the slower the CBC encryption performance due to the chaining nature of CBC encryption. Meanwhile, EAX and GCM show significant time improvements for small file sizes but not too significant improvements for large files. From the results of EAX and GCM, it can be concluded that both modes are efficient for encrypting large files. From the analysis results, it was found that GCM mode provides strong security without a significant impact on system performance. This research can help developers when developing systems that require encryption in environments with limited resources such as embedded systems or IoT devices