PARC4: High performance implementation of RC4 cryptographic algorithm using parallelism

In today's network-based cloud computing era, software applications are playing big role. The security of these software applications is paramount to the successful use of these applications. These applications utilize cryptographic algorithms to secure the data over the network through encryption and decryption processes. The use of parallel processors is now common in both mobile and cloud computing scenarios. Cryptographic algorithms are compute intensive and can significantly benefit from parallelism. This paper introduces a parallel approach to symmetric stream cipher security algorithm known as RC4. The algorithm is very popular and used in many key applications such the Wi-Fi connections, Skype, and Bit Torrent protocol systems. We present an efficient parallel implementation to the compute intensive PRGA that is pseudo-random generation algorithm portion of the RC4 algorithm and the resulted algorithm will be named as PARC4. The algorithm divides a message into fix sized large blocks and encrypts these blocks concurrently on multi core machine.