Performance of Encryption Techniques for Real Time Video Streaming

Recently, multimedia security is becoming more important with the continuous increase of digital communications on the internet. Moreover, special and reliable security is needed in many digital applications (such as video conferencing and medical imaging systems). The classical techniques for data security are not appropriate for the current multimedia usage. As a result, we need to develop new security protocols or adapt the available security protocols to be applicable for securing the multimedia applications. In this paper, three different symmetric encryption techniques are studied namely: AES, RC4 and XOR. The performance of these algorithms was evaluated for three data types (text, audio and video). Simulations were performed to indicate the performance of the selected encryption algorithms for the different data type given. The results showed the effectiveness of the AES encryption technique in such application.