GPU accelerated AES-CBC for database applications
Scott Fazackerley, Steven McAvoy, Ramon Lawrence · 2012
Data warehouses and database applications use encryption to protect and secure sensitive data. Encryption and decryption of data during query processing can incur a significant system overhead and reduces the overall throughput of the system as the CPU must perform the operations. Graphic processing units (GPUs) have been shown to improve query processing and compression by executing some of the operations instead of the CPU. In this work, we show that it is possible to use a low-cost GPU as a cryptographic co-processor that significantly reduces the time required while freeing the CPU for other tasks. Database applications process data in pages, and page-level encryption/decryption is fully parallelisable if the pages are independently encrypted. Our GPU implementation is between 3 and 14 times faster than a commonly used CPU implementation and has encryption and decryption bandwidth over 3 times higher.