The role of decimated sequences in scaling encryption speeds through parallelism

End-to-end encryption can protect proprietary information as it passes from one end of a complex computer network to another, through untrusted intermediate systems. Encryption performance, in terms of bits per second encrypted, has not scaled well, as network performance has increased. The authors felt that multiple encryption modules, operating in parallel would be the cornerstone of scalable encryption. One of the major problems with parallelizing encryption is ensuring that each encryption module is getting the proper portion of the key sequence at the correct point in the encryption or decryption of the message. Many encryption schemes use linear recurring sequences, which may be generated by a linear feedback shift register. Instead of using a linear feedback shift register, the authors describe a method to generate the linear recurring sequence by using parallel decimated sequences, one per encryption module. Computing decimated sequences can be time consuming, so the authors have also described a way to compute these sequences with logic gates rather than arithmetic operations.