Author(s)

Hesham Alhumyani

Computer Engineering Department, Taif University, Taif, KSA.

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) has been extensively used in many systems to provide security. However, many of the implementations are susceptible to Side Channel Attacks (SCA). To address the susceptibility, several researchers have proposed a number of countermeasures. Masking scheme is one of the countermeasures that are commonly used to counteract such attacks. In this paper, we investigate the overhead of the countermeasure in terms of execution time of the first order-masking scheme for the AES “Encryption part only”. To achieve that, we have implemented the sequential algorithm of the AES with single processor, and after that used OpenMP directives to reduce the overhead of the countermeasure. Subsequently, the result of the sequential algorithm has been compared with its parallel implementations using 2, 4, 6, and 8 processors. We show how parallel implementation of the AES offers better performance yet flexible enough for cryptographic algorithms. Compared to the sequential unmasked AES implementation, the best masking scheme for the first order using data parallelism shows a performance in terms of speed up around 5x when 8 threads are used.

Advanced Encryption Standard, Encryptions, Parallelization, OpenMP

Alhumyani, H. (2019) AES Overhead Mitigation Using OpenMP. Journal of Computer and Communications, 7, 206-218. doi: 10.4236/jcc.2019.77017.