I am doing an extended essay in computer science and i am stuck on what to do. I am interested in the topic of the AES algorithm or any encryption algorithms. However as computer science is a science subject i must conduct an experiment. However i am unsure as to how i should test it.
I thought about encrypting different types of files eg. videos, photos and word files ect, and testing the data transmission speeds or encryption speeds compared to other encryption algorithms. I wondered if any of you could tell me how to do this or recommend a different experiment. It cannot be too difficult that i cannot do nor too easy that it is not worthy of a good grade. Thanks. P.S. I a 17 (Year 12)
Certainly there is a wealth of opportunity for research here. Good for you for being curious about this and looking into it. You will likely want to control for a few variables and test along the following lines:
You'll want to run these experiments on the same hardware, under the same load, in the same language, many times in order to get decent data. Especially considering that modern CPUs have the AES-NI instruction set, and custom registers for encryption data, remember to seed your experiments, or subsequent runs could have different performance profiles.
If you do not have previous coding experience, Java, Ruby, and Python all have very popular cryptography libraries and a broad community which is happy to support you if/when you run into challenges. If you're already familiar with one or more specific languages, I'd suggest using one of those, as it will be tricky enough to learn the cryptographic-specific instructions; learning a new language is probably an unnecessary burden to add on at this time.
I think this is sufficiently vague that you will still have to do the research and investigation for your paper, but should provide a starting point. Feel free to follow up with specific questions if you need.