Distributed Platform for the Analysis of Cryptographic Algorithms

Abstract

Data protection and information security have always been intricate problems of the majority of software applications which have been deployed throughout the Internet. Consequently, a substantial effort has been put into the creation and development of a wide variety of solutions to tackle this very issue. The aim of this paper is to offer a means of performance measurement and security validation for some of the encryption algorithms which are extensively used in today's industry (DES, 3DES, AES, etc.), as well as some hash functions. Therefore, the evaluation platform takes on the above mentioned algorithms from two very divergent perspectives: one of them focuses mainly on CPU vs. GPU performance issues, whereas the latter tackles the problem of randomness of the encrypted results by comparison to several strict criteria. In order to achieve these goals, the platform provides a graphical user interface which eases interactions such as: tests selection, worker attachment or removal, events logging, input provision and output analysis. The proposed solution represents an evaluation platform that performs a wide range of tests on hash and symmetric key algorithms in order to deduce their performance and behavior on multiple architectures, as well as various NIST tests, on different environments.