High-Throughput Hybrid AES–ECC Cryptosystem on Commodity CPU–GPU Hardware

Abstract

Data-intensive applications - cloud storage, big data analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), and multimedia streaming - demand cryptographic systems that simultaneously provide strong security and high throughput. Meeting this demand requires rethinking traditional cryptographic architectures. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is commonly used to secure large volumes of data, but it does not support secure key distribution. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is best suited for key exchange. In contrast, the computational cost associated with ECC makes it less efficient to secure large data volumes. To address this challenge, we propose a hybrid cryptosystem combining the strengths of both AES-256 and ECC using commodity devices. The sequential workflow of ECC makes it ideal for execution on the CPU, whereas AES-256 is parallelized on the GPU using CUDA to perform the bulk of data encryption/decryption. The proposed system was implemented, tested, and validated using an Intel Core i7-13620H processor with an NVIDIA RTX 4050 GPU, with data ranging from 10 MiB to 1 GiB. For fair comparison, we also implemented the AES on the CPU as a baseline. The experimental results demonstrate a throughput of 8.01 GiB/s, representing a 106× speedup over the CPU-only baseline, for 1 GiB using Counter mode (CTR). Further analysis reveals that the major cryptosystem bottleneck is the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) overhead, accounting for 68.65% of the total GPU execution time.