Abstract:

Wireless networks play a critical role in the lives of people at work, home, and public places. As the popularity of wireless networks increases, so does the need to protect them. Encryption algorithms play a main role in information security systems. On the other side, those algorithms consume a significant amount of computing resources such as CPU time, memory, and battery power. This paper illustrates the key concepts of security, wireless networks, and security over wireless networks. Wireless security is demonstrated by applying the common security standards like (802.11 WEP and 802.11i  WPA,WPA2) and provides evaluation of six of the most common encryption algorithms on power consumption for wireless devices namely: AES (Rijndael), DES, 3DES, RC2, Blowfish, and RC6.  A comparison has been conducted for those encryption algorithms at different settings for each algorithm such as different sizes of data blocks, different data types, battery power consumption, different key size, date transmission through wireless network and finally encryption/decryption speed. Simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of each algorithm.