An Efficient Acceleration of Symmetric Key Cryptography Using General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit

Graphics Processing Units (GPU) have been the extensive research topic in recent years and have been successfully applied to general purpose applications other than computer graphical area. The nVidia CUDA programming model provides a straightforward means of describing inherently parallel computations. In this paper, we present a study of the efficiency of emerging technology in applying General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU) in high performance symmetric key cryptographic solutions. We implemented symmetric key cryptography algorithm using the novel CUDA platform on nVidia Geforce 280 GTX and compared its performance with an optimized CPU implementation on a high-end AMD Opteron Dual Core CPU. Our experimental results show that GPGPU can perform as an efficient cryptographic accelerator and the developed GPU based implementation achieve a significant performance improvement over CPU based implementation and the maximum observed speedups are about 100 times.