Implementation and Performance Analysis of SEAL Encryption on FPGA, GPU and Multi-core Processors

Accelerators, such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and graphics processing units (GPUs), are special purpose processors designed to speed up compute-intensive sections of applications. FPGAs are highly customizable, while GPUs provide massive parallel execution resources and high memory bandwidth. In this paper, we compare the performance of these architectures, presenting a performance study of SEAL, a fast, software-oriented encryption algorithm on a Virtex-6 FPGA, a Graphics Processor Unit (GPU), and Intel Core i7, a 2-way hyper-threaded, 4-core processor. We show that each platform has relative competitive advantages in encrypting an input plaintext using SEAL.