Performance Analysis on x86 Architecture Microprocessor for Lightweight Encryption

摘要

Encryption is a process to replace information with an unreadable code using specific algorithm so that only the people who have the key and algorithm can understand the original information. The encryption, and its follow up decryption process, requires high computational power, including transposition, substitution, and iteration, which affects the speed and various aspects of performance, especially when applied to a generic processor. This research tries to find the optimum machine instruction composition for lightweight encryption to establish a design for Application-specific Instruction Set Processor (ASIP). The lightweight encryption algorithms used in this research are the Data Encryption Standard (DES) and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), implemented using x86 instruction set architecture and compare the results for the machine instruction composition and the computational speed between the two programs. For machine instruction composition, the result shows that AES requires fewer instructions with 1537 instructions on separate I/O data scenarios and 1487 instructions on data overwrite scenarios. Both algorithms show that the most widely used machine instruction type is the Data Transfer. From performance point of view, AES is faster than DES with an average computational time in separate I/O data scenarios is 0.0544653 seconds and for the data overwrite scenario is 0.0520902 seconds.