PARALLEL ALGORITHMS FOR PUBLIC KEY INFRASTRUCTURE BASED SECURITY TECHNIQUES

Abstract

Cryptographic algorithms are used extensively ensuring the security of data when it s static as well as on the un-trustworthy communication channels. A cryptographic algorithm is the mathematical function used for the encryption and the decryption of data. There are two types of key based data encryption algorithms: symmetric and public Key infrastructure. Symmetric algorithms are those where encryption key can be calculated from decryption key and vice versa. Public key cryptographic algorithms use a pair of two distinct keys public key and private key - that are used for encryption and decryption or for signing and verification. The main property of public key infrastructure based algorithms is that practically it is impossible to calculate the decryption key from a given encryption key. RSA and RSA-based digital signature algorithms are some of the most popularly used public-key infrastructure cryptographic algorithms with their roots in the modular arithmetic. To strengthen the security of these algorithms, larger key sizes are used typically 1024 bit or more, and that makes these algorithms compute-intensive taking longer time during encryption - decryption and signing - verification modules of secure applications. Since the public key based cryptographic algorithms are compute-intensive, their sequential implementations take a lot of time and energy to execute. Parallelization of these security algorithms in order to distribute the complex computational part among the various cores available with the processors today, will achieve higher performance and also be more energy efficient. The objective of this research is to study and analyze various public key infrastructure based cryptographic algorithms and design new parallel algorithms to implement the public-key algorithms such as the RSA and the Digital Signature Algorithm. This research work has been divided into four main parts (i) to convert memory-efficient algorithms into new parallel algorithms, (ii) to use important parallel programming t