crypto-bench

Benchmarks for Rust crypto libraries

Which benchmarks have been written?

	ring	rust-crypto	rust-nettle (Nettle)	rust-openssl (OpenSSL)	sodiumoxide (libsodium)	Windows CNG	Mac/iOS Common Crypto
SHA‑1 & SHA‑2	✅	✅		✅	SHA-{256,512} only
HMAC (SHA‑1 & SHA‑2)
PBKDF2 (SHA‑1 & SHA‑2)	SHA-2 only	✅		SHA-1 only
AES‑128‑GCM & AES‑256‑GCM	✅	✅
ChaCha20‑Poly1305	✅	✅
Salsa20‑Poly1305					✅
ECDH (Suite B) key exchange	✅
X25519 (Curve25519) key exchange	✅	✅
Random Byte Generation
ECDSA (Suite B) signature verification	In Progress (@briansmith)
Ed25519 signature verification	In Progress (@briansmith)	In Progress (@briansmith)
RSA signature verification	In Progress (@briansmith)
ECDSA signing (Suite B with SHA‑1 & SHA‑2)
Ed25519 (Curve25519) signing	✅	✅
RSA signing (SHA‑1 & SHA‑2)

• fastpbkdf2 is also benchmarked, for PBKDF2 only.
• "Suite B" refers the the P-256 and P-384 elliptic curves.
• "SHA-2" refers to SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512.

How to contribute

Add new benchmarks

Follow the style of the existing examples. When implementing the same benchmark across multiple implementations, make sure that you're comparing the same thing (as much as is practical). Also, follow the submodule structure and naming scheme used in the existing benchmarks. It is often useful to create macros to minimize the amount of boilerplate required.

Add tools for visualizing the results

For example, it would be great to be able to get a graph or a table, or JSON that can be imported into some charting library, that allows one to compare the performance of one implementation to another. Similarly, it would be awesome to have a tool that allows one to see how the performance of a particular crypto library changes between versions.

These tools do not need to be written in Rust. They can be in Python or shell scripts or whatever. I highly recommend just scraping the output of cargo bench instead of trying to make changes to rustc, Cargo, and the Rust standard library. Perfect is the enemy of the good.

How to run all the benchmarks for all implementations

These benchmarks currently only can be built/run using Nightly Rust because they use Rust's built-in benchmarking feature, and that feature is marked "unstable" (i.e. "Nightly-only").

git clone https://github.com/briansmith/crypto-bench && cd crypto-bench && cargo update && cargo +nightly bench

You must use Rust Nightly because cargo bench is used for these benchmarks, and only Right Nightly supports cargo bench.

You don't need to run cargo build, and in fact cargo build does not do anything useful for this crate.

./cargo +nightly test runs one iteration of every benchmark for every implementation. This is useful for quickly making sure that a change to the benchmarks does not break them. Do this before submitting a pull request.

cargo update in the workspace root will update all the libraries to the latest version.

How to run all the benchmarks for a specific crypto library

• cargo +nightly bench -p crypto_bench_fastpbkdf2 runs all the tests for rust-fastpbkdf2.
• cargo +nightly bench -p crypto_bench_openssl runs all the tests for rust-openssl.
• cargo +nightly bench -p crypto_bench_ring runs all the tests for ring.
• cargo +nightly bench -p crypto_bench_rust_crypto runs all the tests for rust-crypto.
• cargo +nightly bench -p crypto_bench_sodiumoxide runs all the tests for sodiumoxide.

How to run other subsets of the benchmarks

cargo bench takes arbitrary substrings of the test names as parameters, so you can get as specific as you want. For example, cargo +nightly bench sha512::_2000 will run just the SHA-512 benchmark that takes a 2000 byte input, for every implementation.

Why does each implementation's benchmark live in a separate crate?

• Not all implementations build and work on all platforms. And, some implementations requre manual configuration (e.g. building/installing some third-party C library) to work.

• Some implementations may not be able to (correctly) coexist in the same program because they define extern C symbols with the same names, but which are not interoperable. (This used to be the case for ring and rust-openssl, however ring implemented a workaround that allows ring to be used alongside other OpenSSL forks.)

License

CC0.