GPU accelerated cryptography as an OS service

  • Authors:
  • Owen Harrison;John Waldron

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland;Department of Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland

  • Venue:
  • Transactions on computational science XI
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Graphics processing units (GPUs) have become popular devices for accelerating general purpose computing. In recent years there has been a surge in research involving the use of GPUs as cryptographic accelerators. Research has shown that contemporary GPU architectures can achieve higher throughput in the context of both symmetric and asymmetric key cryptography than a traditional CPU. Despite the existence of these new approaches, there remains no way for OS kernel services or userspace applications to make use of these implementations in a practical manner. To overcome this shortcoming, this paper investigates the integration of GPU accelerated cryptographic algorithms with an established service virtualisation layer within the Linux kernel, the OCF-Linux framework. This paper demonstrates that it is feasible to use a centralised kernel service to provide a standardised abstraction to GPU accelerated cryptographic functions for both kernelspace and userspace components.