Towards A Scalable Symmetric Key Cryptographic Scheme: Performance Evaluation and Security Analysis

In most applications, security attributes are pretty difficult to meet but it becomes even a bigger challenge when talking about Grid Computing. To secure data passes in Grid Systems, we need a professional scheme that does not affect the overall performance of the grid system. Therefore, we previously developed a new security scheme “ULTRA GRIDSEC” that is used to accelerate the performance of the symmetric key encryption algorithms for both stream and block cipher encryption algorithms. The scheme is used to accelerate the security of data pass between elements of our newly developed pure peer-to-peer desktop grid framework, “HIMAN”. It also enhances the security of the encrypted data resulted from the scheme and prevents the problem of weak keys of the encryption algorithms. This paper covers the analysis and evaluation of this scheme showing the different factors affecting the scheme performance, and covers the efficiency of the scheme from the security prospective. The experimental results are highlighted for two types of encryption algorithms, TDES as an example for the block cipher algorithms, and RC4 as an example for the stream cipher algorithms. The scheme speeds up the former algorithm by 202.12% and the latter one by 439.7%. These accelerations are also based on the running machine's capabilities.