Database Encryption Using Asymmetric Keys: A Case Study

Data security has become an issue of increasing importance, especially for Web applications and distributed databases. One solution is using cryptographic algorithms whose improvement has become a constant concern. The increasing complexity of these algorithms involves higher execution times, leading to an application performance decrease. This paper presents a comparison of execution times for three algorithms using asymmetric keys, depending on the size of the encryption/decryption keys: RSA, ElGamal, and ECIES. For this algorithms comparison, a benchmark using Java APIs and an application for testing them on a test database was created.