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I am doing an experiment for an essay in computer science. My topic is focused around encryption. Having conducted some research, I am interested in testing symmetric encryption programs such as AES, DES, Blowfish and Twofish. However I am stuck for ideas on how to test them.

I had the idea of comparing file sizes after encryption to see which one is the most efficient. I must also include Big-O notation in my experiment.

Could someone direct me on how I could possibly do this, or suggest any other experiments that I could possibly do. P.S. I am only a 6th form student therefore my knowledge is limited, so please ensure the experiment is not too difficult. Thank you very much.

TreyBCollier
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    Measuring the filesize is probably not going to give you any interesting results, most ciphers deliver a ciphertext which is normally no more than 16 characters different in length. You could simply benchmark each algorithm for a variety of different plaintexts and infer the big O notation from your results – Luke Joshua Park Jan 14 '17 at 19:20
  • Luke is right. The input size to output size ratio will likely be very constant, but you can extrapolate performance from repeated iterations of encrypting various file sizes (10B, 10KB, 10MB, etc.). If you need to actually calculate the Big-O from the algorithms, you can find them online in various languages. From your previous question, I think there are enough interesting observations available about linear scaling within and across ciphers. – Andy Jan 16 '17 at 17:41

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