I’m doing some clean-up on my computer and before I delete this, I thought I’d do a quick post on it. It’s been said that asymmetric encryption should be used for key-exchange (a la Diffie-Helman) because it’s too slow to do regular encryption.
Well, for a project I was working on, I did some simple time-trials to test this, and below is what I discovered.
And if you are interested in the raw data, here is it – below:
|
Bytes |
AES Time |
PKI Time |
| 500,000 | 0.013339 | 0.384184 |
| 1,000,000 | 0.027213 | 0.770122 |
| 1,500,000 | 0.040376 | 1.173847 |
| 2,000,000 | 0.052063 | 1.548068 |
| 2,500,000 | 0.06758 | 1.938064 |
| 3,000,000 | 0.077545 | 2.321055 |
| 3,500,000 | 0.090704 | 2.719512 |
| 4,000,000 | 0.11909 | 3.073616 |
| 4,500,000 | 0.113535 | 3.463312 |
| 5,000,000 | 0.141236 | 3.864439 |
| 5,500,000 | 0.14997 | 4.260612 |
| 6,000,000 | 0.149839 | 4.656699 |
| 6,500,000 | 0.163659 | 5.034873 |
| 7,000,000 | 0.214086 | 5.434759 |
| 7,500,000 | 0.200605 | 5.857154 |
| 8,000,000 | 0.201672 | 6.19732 |
| 8,500,000 | 0.225572 | 6.547349 |
| 9,000,000 | 0.280918 | 6.936493 |
| 9,500,000 | 0.261376 | 7.321592 |
| 10,000,000 | 0.25104 | 7.697328 |
| 10,500,000 | 0.260751 | 8.098898 |
| 11,000,000 | 0.334143 | 8.57437 |
| 11,500,000 | 0.307117 | 8.929148 |
The first column is how many bytes I was trying to encrypt, the middle column is how long it too using AES-256, and the 3rd column is how long it took using an x.509 certificate.
[…] By the way, this more-secure PKI is only used to exchange a key because AES-256 encryption is is 4x to 29x faster than PKI! […]
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[…] here, but is much slower and resource intensive than symmetric encryption. For more detail on this, see some example performance metrics and this thread discussing why asymmetric encryption is not a great fit for large amounts of […]
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