crypto for the average programmer

[Jack Lloyd]

On Tue, Dec 27, 2005 at 02:28:07PM +0000, Ben Laurie wrote:

> Apparently this rather depends on platform and compiler options. I am
> reliably informed that GMP is not always faster.
> 
> For those that really care it'd be cool if someone did a careful
> comparison. It would also be interesting to know why they differ.

Thank you for the correction. My statement was primarily on the basis of some
benchmarks I ran at the time I wrote some backend code in Botan to dump crypto
operations to GNU MP and/or OpenSSL when available, and at the time GNU MP
outperformed OpenSSL by a fairly large margin on x86 and Alpha machines (up to
50% on large RSA private key operations; as the keys got smaller the
performance difference reduced, down to basically nothing at 512 bit
keys). However I have since checked my changelogs and realized I must have run
those tests almost two years ago now (which surprised me a bit!), so I'm sure
those results are not particularly reflective of current performance. I'll have
to revisit this and see how things stack up these days on the platforms I care
about.

-Jack

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com