Investigating the Performance of C and C++ Cryptographic Libraries

Abstract

This paper presents a study on performance comparison of several cryptographic primitives from six C/C++ open source libraries with the aim to understand the performance cost of the primitives and to find the most efficient primitive and library. The paper will also study the effect of the key length on the performance of variable key-length primitives. The results show that AES is the most efficient block cipher tested. The size of the key has some effect on the performance of the primitives. Smaller key sizes show better performance. However, this is not true for all the primitives with variable key length.