Genetic algorithms are a population-based Meta heuristics. They have been successfully applied to many optimization problems. However, premature convergence is an inherent characteristic of such classical genetic algorithms that makes them incapable of searching numerous solutions of the problem domain. A memetic algorithm is an extension of the traditional genetic algorithm. It uses a local search technique to reduce the likelihood of the premature convergence. The cryptanalysis of simplified data encryption standard can be formulated as NP-Hard combinatorial problem. In this paper, a comparison between memetic algorithm and genetic algorithm were made in order to investigate the performance for the cryptanalysis on simplified data encryption standard problems(SDES). The methods were tested and various experimental results show that memetic algorithm performs better than the genetic algorithms for such type of NP-Hard combinatorial problem. This paper represents our first effort toward efficient memetic algorithm for the cryptanalysis of SDES.