Accelerating private-key cryptography via multithreading on symmetric multiprocessors

Achieving high performance in cryptographic processing is important due to the increasing connectivity among today’s computers. Despite steady improvements in microprocessor and system performance, private-key cipher implementations continue to be slow. Irrespective of the cipher used, the main reason for the low performance is lack of parallelism, which fundamentally comes from encryption modes such as the Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) mode. In CBC, each plaintext block is XOR’ed with the previous ciphertext block and then encrypted, essentially inducing a tight recurrence through the ciphertext blocks. To deliver high performance while maintaining high level of security assurance in real systems, the cryptography community has proposed Interleaved Cipher Block Chaining (ICBC) mode.