A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF AES AND RSA ALGORITHMS FOR DIGITAL DATA SECURITY

Abstract

The expansion of digital services has increased both the volume and the value of information that must be protected. Unauthorized disclosure, interception, alteration, and misuse of stored or transmitted data make confidentiality an important security requirement. Cryptography addresses this requirement by converting readable information into an encoded form and recovering it through a corresponding decryption procedure. This study examines the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) by comparing their structures, key mechanisms, computational characteristics, and practical roles in digital security. A descriptive comparative method was applied by examining relevant literature and the performance measurements used in this study. AES represents symmetric encryption because the same secret key is involved in both directions of the process, whereas RSA employs a public-key and private-key pair. The measured results show that AES-128 completed encryption in 5.8 ms/character and decryption in 27.2 ms/character, while RSA required 8.7 ms/character and 47.6 ms/character, respectively. These findings indicate that AES is the more efficient option for bulk data encryption, while RSA is better suited to asymmetric tasks such as key establishment and digital signatures. A combined scheme can therefore use AES for the data payload and RSA for protecting the session key, reducing the principal key-distribution weakness of symmetric encryption.