Hybrid Cryptography: Performance Analysis of Various Cryptographic Combinations for Secure Communication

The amount of data that is transmitted across the internet is continuously increasing. With the transmission of this huge volume of data, the need of an encryption algorithm that guarantees the data transmission speedily and in a secure manner is a must. Hence, to achieve security in wireless networks, cryptography plays a very important role. In this paper, several hybrid combinations, which combines both symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic techniques to offer high security with minimum key maintenance is presented. This hybrid combination offers several cryptographic primitives such as integrity, confidentiality and authentication, thereby enhancing the security. Various combinations of Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Rivest, Shamir and Adleman (RSA) algorithms are used to provide hybrid encryption. Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-256) is also used to provide authentication and integrity. The experimental results show that the proposed hybrid combinations gives better performance in terms of computation time compared to individual cryptographic schemes.