Security is critical to a wide range of applications and services. Numerous security mechanisms and protocols have been developed and are widely used with today’s Internet. These protocols, which provide secrecy, authentication, and integrity control, are essential to protecting electronic information. There are many types of security protocols and mechanisms, such as symmetric key algorithms, asymmetric key algorithms, message digests, digital certificates, and secure socket layer (SSL) communication. Symmetric and asymmetric key algorithms provide secrecy. Message digests are used for authentication. SSL communication provides a secure connection between two sockets. The purpose of this graduate project was to do performance analysis on various security protocols. These are performance comparisons of symmetric key algorithms DES (Data Encryption Standard), 3DES (Triple DES), AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), and RC4; of public-private key algorithms RSA and ElGamal; of digital certificates using message digests SHA1 (Secure Hash Algorithm) and MD5; and of SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) communication using security algorithms 3DES with SHA1 and RC4 with MD5.