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This is a big reason why ZeroTier is moving to AES for its symmetric crypto. It's not only a lot faster but much more power efficient. The blazing speeds with ARX ciphers are only achievable using vector or other parallel constructions that light up the whole ALU, using many times more power than AES hardware.

Using AES with GMAC I can clock from 2-4GiB/sec/core on typical laptops and over 1GiB/sec on phones. The Apple M1 does almost 5GiB/sec/core. Gen10 and newer Intel CPUs with VAES have produced benchmarks in excess of 10GiB/sec/core, which means a single core could theoretically saturate 100gig fiber if it were just doing crypto.

Of course nothing stops CPU makers from adding ARX accelerator instructions, but I have yet to see any proposed. If constructions like ChaCha and BLAKE2/BLAKE3 get popular enough I could see this happening.



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