| | |
Summary: Architectural Support for Fast Symmetric-Key Cryptography
Jerome Burke John McDonald Todd Austin
Advanced Computer Architecture Laboratory
University of Michigan
jaburke,johngm,austin @eecs.umich.edu
Abstract
The emergence of the Internet as a trusted medium for
commerce and communication has made cryptography an
essential component of modern information systems. Cryp-
tography provides the mechanisms necessary to implement
accountability, accuracy, and confidentiality in communi-
cation. As demands for secure communication bandwidth
grow, efficient cryptographic processing will become in-
creasingly vital to good system performance.
In this paper, we explore techniques to improve the per-
formance of symmetric key cipher algorithms. Eight pop-
ular strong encryption algorithms are examined in detail.
Analysis reveals the algorithms are computationally com-
plex and contain little parallelism. Overall throughput on a
high-end microprocessor is quite poor, a 600 Mhz proces-
|
