Cryptography is the lynchpin of data security- besides providing message confidentiality it facilitates message integrity, authentication and digital signatures. The design of a secure application is not possible without the use of some encryption and decryption techniques. An important task for cryptographers is the analysis and recommendation of parameters, crucially including key size and thus implying key strength, for cryptographic primitives.
Cryptographic hash functions are important tool in cryptography to achieve certain security goals such as authenticity, digital signature, and digital time stamping and entity authentication. This paper presents an analysis of the speed and the performance of various security algorithms by varying key size and file size. Comparative study is based on symmetric encryption algorithm Data Encryption Standard (DES), asymmetric encryption technique RSA proposed by Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman and the widely used cryptographic hash function Secure Hash algorithm (SHA1).