Architectural Support for Fast Symmetric-Key Cryptography

The emergence of the Internet as a trusted medium for commerce and communication has made cryptography an essential component of modern information systems. Cryptography provides the mechanisms necessary to implement accountability, accuracy, and confidentiality in communication. As demands for secure communication bandwidth grow, efficient cryptographic processing will become increasingly vital to good system performance. In this paper, we explore techniques to improve the performance of symmetric key cipher algorithms. Eight popular strong encryption algorithms are examined in detail. Analysis reveals the algorithms are computationally complex and contain little parallelism. Overall throughput on a high-end microprocessor is quite poor, a 600 Mhz processor is incapable of saturating a T3 communication line with 3DES (triple DES) encrypted data. We introduce new instructions that improve the efficiency of the analyzed algorithms. Our approach adds instruction set support for fast ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Jerome Burke, John McDonald, Todd M. Austin
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2000, Key Cipher Algorithms, Programming Languages, Secure Communication Bandwidth, Strong Encryption Algorithms