Cryptography primarily is encryption, which forms the basis of security and allows for privacy in computers. There are five common cryptographic algorithms used in the world. They include Triple DES, RSA, Blowfish, Twofish and AES.
Triple DES (Data Encryption Standard) was one of the most used and recommended Symmetric algorithm in the industry. Symmetric means both the sender and the receiver must have the shared key known only to them to decrypt. It employs triple individual 56bit keys hence the name Triple DES (Gupta, Agrawal & Yamaguchi, 2016). This eliminated the insecure nature of DES by forcing data to be decrypted three times.
RSA unlike DES is considered to be an asymmetric algorithm and employs keys pair. One key is used for the encryption of the date and another for its decryption. The key used to encrypt the data is called public key and the one used of decrypting is referred to as a private key (Khan & Tuteja, 2015). RSA is mainly used for data encryption on the internet.
Blowfish is another cipher symmetric in nature also designed to address and eventually replace the flaws of DES by splitting information into 64bit blocks. Like RSA its used on the internet but for securing payment procedures for e-commerce platforms (Gupta, Agrawal & Yamaguchi, 2016). It has gained track in the industry because of availability and is considered one of the most flexible Algorithms in existence.
Two fish, on the other hand, is also symmetric but employs up to 256bit length keys for data encoding (Gupta, Agrawal & Yamaguchi, 2016). It is used in both software and hardware environments such as CPU’s because it is very fast. Its availability is wide because it is primarily free for anyone who needs it to use.
AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) is the final common cryptographic algorithm widely used in US government systems and the private sector. This is because it is considered the number encryption against all attacks. AES uses keys of 192 and 256 bits for advanced encryption but is primarily based on a uniquely efficient 128-bit form (Khan & Tuteja, 2015).