benchmarks.html
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<HEAD> <TITLE> ICE Benchmarks </TITLE> </HEAD>
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<H1> ICE Benchmarks </H1>
<P>
The C implementation of ICE was benchmarked on a 100MHz 486 PC
running Linux. It is compared for speed against an optimized DES
implementation. </P>
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<TABLE BORDER>
<TR>
<TH> Operation (x 100000)
<TH> Time (seconds)
<TR>
<TH ALIGN=LEFT> DES encryption
<TD ALIGN=RIGHT> 2.37
<TR>
<TH ALIGN=LEFT> DES decryption
<TD ALIGN=RIGHT> 2.40
<TR>
<TH ALIGN=LEFT> DES key change
<TD ALIGN=RIGHT> 4.98
<TR>
<TH ALIGN=LEFT> ICE encryption
<TD ALIGN=RIGHT> 1.63
<TR>
<TH ALIGN=LEFT> ICE decryption
<TD ALIGN=RIGHT> 1.59
<TR>
<TH ALIGN=LEFT> ICE key change
<TD ALIGN=RIGHT> 44.79
<TR>
<TH ALIGN=LEFT> Thin-ICE encryption
<TD ALIGN=RIGHT> 0.88
<TR>
<TH ALIGN=LEFT> Thin-ICE decryption
<TD ALIGN=RIGHT> 0.87
<TR>
<TH ALIGN=LEFT> Thin-ICE key change
<TD ALIGN=RIGHT> 22.45
<TR>
<TH ALIGN=LEFT> ICE-2 encryption
<TD ALIGN=RIGHT> 3.12
<TR>
<TH ALIGN=LEFT> ICE-2 decryption
<TD ALIGN=RIGHT> 3.04
<TR>
<TH ALIGN=LEFT> ICE-2 key change
<TD ALIGN=RIGHT> 89.63
</TABLE>
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<P>
For equivalent levels of security ICE is consistently faster than
DES for encryption and decryption. Although to be fair, its speed
advantage over DES is almost entirely due to its lack of an initial
and final permutation. </P>
<P>
As expected, ICE-2 is about half the speed of standard ICE. It provides
a similar level of security to Triple-DES, but without the factor of
three slowdown. </P>
<P>
The slowness of key changes is due to the way the ICE key schedule
operates on only one key bit at a time, whereas the DES implementation
operates on 28-bit blocks. This can be a feature or a drawback, depending
on how you look at it. On the one hand it slows down exhaustive key
searches, but on the other hand it may slow down some legitimate uses. </P>
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