SoK: A Performance Evaluation of Cryptographic Instruction Sets on Modern Architectures

Abstract

The latest processors have included extensions to the instruction set architecture tailored to speed up the execution of cryptographic algorithms. Like the AES New Instructions (AES-NI) that target the AES encryption algorithm, the release of the SHA New Instructions (SHA-NI), designed to support the SHA-256 hash function, introduces a new scenario for optimizing cryptographic software. In this work, we present a performance evaluation of several cryptographic algorithms, hash-based signatures and data encryption, on platforms that support AES-NI and/or SHA-NI. In particular, we revisited several optimization techniques targeting multiple-message hashing, and as a result, we reduce by 21% the running time of this task by means of a pipelined SHA-NI implementation. In public-key cryptography, multiple-message hashing is one of the critical operations of the XMSS and XMSS^MT post-quantum hash-based digital signatures. Using SHA-NI extensions, signatures are computed 4x faster; however, our pipelined SHA-NI implementation increased this speedup factor to 4.3x. For symmetric cryptography, we revisited the implementation of AES modes of operation and reduced by 12% and 7% the running time of CBC decryption and CTR encryption, respectively.