Blockchain Technology Performance of Asymmetric Algorithms: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Blockchain technology is a transparent, and unchangeable distributed ledger. It has the potential to transform the way to interact with the digital world by allowing to construct a decentralized database that is tamper-proof. Concerns regarding the security of confidential and sensitive data being outsourced are rising. It is possible that service providers may be dishonest since unscrupulous administrators have access to, may alter, and can misuse private and sensitive data. Security precautions are necessary because sensitive data stored on public clouds has to be safeguarded. There is no mechanism to detect data changes, as data are stored in plaintext. Therefore, maintaining privacy and secrecy is impossible. It is important that data must always be kept secure, even after it has been kept on the server. Data stored on the server must be safeguarded against outsider access and, if the insider cannot be trusted, must also be safeguarded against hostile insiders. Asymmetric algorithms are employed to safeguard data during transmission. Asymmetric cryptography is required in modern security systems, and several algorithms have been devised to provide safe and effective encryption and decryption. Asymmetric algorithms are empirically compared in this study. We evaluated each algorithm's performance by taking into account criteria such as key size, memory utilization, and execution time. Our results show that while all algorithms provide safe encryption and decryption, there are significant performance disparities between them. It is determined, in particular, that ECC required the least amount of memory and had the shortest key size. The findings show that ECC's prime and binary fields created pairs of keys faster and with more security than other asymmetric algorithms with smaller bit sizes. On small, medium, and big datasets, ECC had the fastest execution time for plaintext encryption operations. These findings have important implications for the selection and deployment of asymmetric algorithms in various security systems.