Crypto++ 3.1 Benchmarks

Here are speed benchmarks for some of the most popular hash algorithms and symmetric and asymmetric ciphers. All were coded in C++ or ported to C++ from C implementations, compiled with Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 SP2 (optimize for speed, Pentium Pro code generation), and ran on a Celeron 450MHz machine under Windows 2000 beta 3. No assembly language was used.

Notes

• Crypto++ 3.1 Benchmark Average for this platform: 1451.428. This number is computed by taking the geometric mean of the number of bytes/second of each cipher, hash function, and MAC, and operations/second of each crypto operation listed above.
• RSA and LUC use 17 as the public exponent.
• DH and ElGamal encryption and decryption use short exponents to save time. The size of the secret exponents were chosen so that a meet-in-the-middle attack would be slower than the general discrete log algorithm. The sizes used were:

  modulus	exponent
  512	122
  1024	166
  2048	228

• BlumGoldwasser is timed on a 16-byte plaintext. The lowest log(log(n)) bits of each square are used.
• EC means elliptic curve. Operations in GF(2^n) are implemented using trinomial basis.
• All tests were done by repeating the crypto operations over small blocks of random (and changing) data. In practice you will likely see slower speeds because time is needed to transfer data to and from memory.
• For the ciphers that specify big endian byte order, the timing data listed include time needed to convert to and from little endian order. For some ciphers (WAKE and SHA) this is a large fraction (up to 25%) of the total time.
• The RSA, RW, DH, MQV, and elliptic curve schemes come from the IEEE P1363 draft standard. For more info see http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/1363/index.html.
• Precomputation means using a table of 16 precomputed powers of each fixed base to speed up exponentiation.
• Tiger and SHARK are designed to take advantage of 64-bit word operations. Their relatives speeds can be expected to be much higher if the benchmarks were done on a 64-bit CPU.