Implementation of cryptographic algorithms on a Grid infrastructure

Cryptographic algorithms are the fundamental building blocks of information security systems and their strength generally relies on the concept of computational complexity. But the process of increasing the computational effort needed by an adversary in order to break the provided security has a dramatic impact on the performance of the cryptographic application and sets a severe limit to the proposed security level due to the computational and data intensive operations which require extensive processing power and storage resources. Our solution is to link cryptography to an architecture specially designed to satisfy these demands, namely Grid computing, which has known an increasing popularity in recent years. The wide majority of cryptographic algorithms are designed sequentially and are not ready to embrace the enhancement brought by advances in parallel and distributed computing technologies and hence can not take the plunge to a higher performance level through parallel execution without a proper adjustment process. This paper presents our results on adjusting and implementing several well known cryptographic algorithms on a Grid infrastructure focusing on the achieved performance improvements.