END-TO-END DATA ENCRYPTION: BUILDING SECURE PIPELINES FOR SENSITIVE DATA

Abstract

As industries increasingly rely on cloud computing and distributed systems, ensuring the secure transmission of sensitive data has become paramount. This paper evaluates the performance and security of three widely-used encryption algorithms—AES-256, RSA-2048, and Blowfish—in an end-to-end encrypted data pipeline. Through a series of practical simulations, the study assesses encryption and decryption times, CPU and memory utilization, and security strength for datasets of varying sizes (10 MB, 100 MB, 500 MB). The findings reveal that AES-256 consistently outperforms RSA-2048 and Blowfish in terms of computational efficiency, encrypting a 500 MB dataset in 750 ms compared to RSA-2048’s 2900 ms and Blowfish’s 850 ms. AES-256 also demonstrated superior resource efficiency, using 50% CPU for large datasets, compared to RSA-2048's 75%. In security tests, AES-256 and RSA-2048 both achieved 100% data integrity, with AES-256 scoring a 9.5 out of 10 in attack resistance. These results highlight AES-256 as the most suitable algorithm for real-time encryption in secure data pipelines, balancing performance and security.