multi-threaded encryption

[Werner Koch]

On Tue, 20 Feb 2007 03:20, cbienia at CS.Princeton.EDU said:

> Our idea is to let a small number of students parallelize GnuPG with
> pthreads with some help and guidance from my side. After the
> parallelization, GnuPG will support encryption / decryption of a single
> stream with multiple CPUs (instead of mere thread-safety or
> multi-processing). Obviously, some cipher modes add dependencies between

For the symmetric part that does not make sense as this is strictly a
sequential operation.  For the public key operations, using several
CPUs at once might be useful to boost the modular operaions.  However,
it will be pretty tricky to do this and I am not sure whether it is
possible at all.

The only part where I can see that parallelization makes sense is in
encrypting to several recipients.  This can trivially be parallelized.

In general I am strictly against using preemptive threading for a
security applicaqtion.  It is just too hard to get right.


Salam-Shalom,

   Werner