Parallel Platform for Supporting Stream Ciphers Over Multi-core Processors

Abstract

Designing secure and fast cryptographic primitives is one of the critical issues in the current era. Several domains, including Internet of Things (IoT), military and banking, require fast and secure data encryption over public channels. Most of the existing stream ciphers are designed to work sequentially and therefore not utilizing available computing power. Also, other stream ciphers are designed based on complex mathematical problems which makes these ciphers slower due to the complex computations. For this purpose, a novel parallel platform for enhancing the performance of stream ciphers is presented. The platform is designed to work efficiently over multi-core processors using multithreading techniques. The architecture of the platform relies on independent components that can operate over multiple cores available on the corresponding communication ends. Two groups of stream ciphers were considered as case studies in our experiments. The first category includes stream ciphers of a sequential design, while the second category includes parallelizable stream ciphers. Performance tests and analysis shows that the parallel platform was able to maximize the encryption throughput of the selected stream ciphers dramatically. The enhancements on the encryption throughput is relative to the constructional design of the stream ciphers. Parallelized stream ciphers (Salsa20, DSP-128, and ECSC-128) was able to achieve higher throughput compared to other sequentially designed stream ciphers.