Abstract

This project explores various classical ciphers and one modern symmetric cipher, namely DES
and one block mode (ECB). The results of each of these implementations were recorded, the time taken
for encryption and decryption were measured for visualization. Additionally, previous research on the
topics we have chosen were also explored. An optimization for ECB mode was also suggested for non-
random data, this was tested with a small corpus of Wikipedia articles. Moreover, the algorithms were
implemented in scripting languages unlike most popular crypto packages. Hence, one of the project
contributions is to see cryptosystems performance in scripting languages.