With the growth in the use of Internet in various fields like medical, education and private sector, the security and privacy of the data has become very important. Internet does most of the data handling and electronic transactions today. When the sender transfers the information to the receiver on the Internet, it may be eavesdropped by an intruder and thus is a continuous threat to the secrecy or confidentiality of the data. Cryptography is the popular technique that protects the confidentiality of the data. Cryptography converts the plain text into a form which can not be understood and then receiver applies reverse mechanism to decrypt the unreadable form of data to readable form. This mechanism is called as encryption-decryption process. Thus, for a secured transfer of data over the Internet, it is important to find out which algorithm performs better than the other algorithms. In this paper, the different symmetric encryption algorithms like AES, Blowfish, DES, RC4 and RSA have been analyzed with respect to different parameters.

Index Terms- Cryptography, AES, Blowfish, DES, RC4 and RSA