A Comparison of AES Candidates on the Alpha 21264

We compare the five candidates for the Advanced Encryption Standard based on their performance on the Alpha 21264, a 64-bit superscalar processor. There are several new features of the 21264 that have a significant impact on encryption/decryption speed. The main ones are greater potential for instruction-level parallelism (ILP) and larger level 1 cache. The ILP comes from the fact that the 21264 can issue four integer instructions per cycle. We envision that for high-performance servers, there will be multiple streams of data for encryption or decryption. The type of parallelism that we consider in this paper is the encryption of multiple, independent blocks interleaved in the same code loop running on the same processor. This benefits some algorithms more than others. Rijndael and Twofish turn out to be the fastest for a single block at a time, but RC6 is potentially the fastest when processing two blocks at a time. The reason for this is that out-of-order execution together with an ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: AES
• Authors: Richard Weiss, Nathan L. Binkert
• Keywords: 64-bit Superscalar Processor, Advanced Encryption Standard, AES 2000, Cryptology, Encryption