Exploiting the Power of GPUs for Asymmetric Cryptography

  • Authors:
  • Robert Szerwinski;Tim Güneysu

  • Affiliations:
  • Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany;Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany

  • Venue:
  • CHES '08 Proceeding sof the 10th international workshop on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Modern Graphics Processing Units (GPU) have reached a dimension with respect to performance and gate count exceeding conventional Central Processing Units (CPU) by far. Many modern computer systems include --- beside a CPU --- such a powerful GPU which runs idle most of the time and might be used as cheap and instantly available co-processor for general purpose applications.In this contribution, we focus on the efficient realisation of the computationally expensive operations in asymmetric cryptosystems on such off-the-shelf GPUs. More precisely, we present improved and novel implementations employing GPUs as accelerator for RSA and DSA cryptosystems as well as for Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). Using a recent Nvidia 8800GTS graphics card, we are able to compute 813 modular exponentiations per second for RSA or DSA-based systems with 1024 bit integers. Moreover, our design for ECC over the prime field P-224 even achieves the throughput of 1412 point multiplications per second.