Performance Comparison of the AES Submissions

Abstract

The principal goal guiding the design of any encryption algorithm must be security. In the real world, however, performance and implementation cost are always of concern. Making the assumption that the major AES candidates are secure (a big assumption, to be sure, but one that is best dealt with in another paper), the most important properties the algorithms will be judged on will be the performance and cost of implementation. In this paper, we will completely ignore security. Instead, we will compare the performance of the leading AES candidates on a variety of common platforms: 32-bit CPUs, 64-bit CPUs, cheap 8-bit smart-card CPUs, and dedicated hardware. For each platform, we first make some general observations on the performance issues for each of the platforms, then compare the various AES candidates, and finally look at the specific issues for each of the candidates.