An experimental analysis of cryptographic overhead in performance-critical systems

This paper studies the performance implications of using cryptographic controls in performance-critical systems. Full cryptographic controls beyond basic authentication are considered and experimentally validated in the concept of network file systems. This paper demonstrates that processor speeds have become fast enough to support cryptographic controls in many performance-critical systems. Integrity and authentication using keyed-hash and RSA as well as confidentiality using RC5 are tested. This analysis demonstrates that full cryptographic controls are feasible in a distributed network file system, by showing the performance overhead for including signature, hash and encryption algorithms on various embedded and workstation computers. The results from these experiments are used to predict the performance impact using three proposed network disk security schemes.