{"id":582,"date":"2013-03-30T09:14:54","date_gmt":"2013-03-30T16:14:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inkofpark.wordpress.com\/?p=582"},"modified":"2013-03-30T09:14:54","modified_gmt":"2013-03-30T16:14:54","slug":"raspberry-pi-truecrypt-benchmark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.inkofpark.com\/?p=582","title":{"rendered":"Raspberry Pi TrueCrypt Benchmark"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note: The results in this post have been improved with more accurate values at Revised Raspberry Pi TrueCrypt Benchmark<\/a>.<\/strong><\/h3>\n

I recently acquired a Raspberry Pi model B 512 MB from the excellent people at Adafruit<\/a>. I am interested in it as a small computer for basic text processing, and am curious about its performance in consumer crypto. One part of the security of the Pi, or any modern computer, is disk encryption.<\/p>\n

My disk encryption of choice is TrueCrypt, mainly because it is cross-platform. That it is also free and open source is a nice benefit, though the TrueCrypt3 license may not rise to Stallman\u2019s standard. I found several posts from persons who compiled TrueCrypt on the RasPi, and it is relatively trouble free. At the bottom of the post are my notes on how I did the install and a script that performs the benchmarking.<\/p>\n

While I don\u2019t understand the relationship between the hashing function and the encryption function, I expected that speed would be unrelated to the hash algorithm. This was not what I experienced, as shown in the data below.<\/p>\n

Performance, in MB seconds, as TrueCrypt reports for initializing a 10,000,000 byte file.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Hash<\/b><\/td>\nEncryption<\/b><\/td>\nSpeed
\n(MB\/s)<\/b><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
RIPEMD-160<\/td>\nTwofish<\/td>\n3.4<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
RIPEMD-160<\/td>\nSerpent<\/td>\n3<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
RIPEMD-160<\/td>\nAES<\/td>\n2.5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
SHA-512<\/td>\nTwofish<\/td>\n2.5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
RIPEMD-160<\/td>\nTwofish-Serpent<\/td>\n2.3<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
SHA-512<\/td>\nSerpent<\/td>\n2.2<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
SHA-512<\/td>\nAES<\/td>\n2<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
RIPEMD-160<\/td>\nAES-Twofish<\/td>\n2<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
RIPEMD-160<\/td>\nSerpent-AES<\/td>\n1.9<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
SHA-512<\/td>\nTwofish-Serpent<\/td>\n1.8<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
SHA-512<\/td>\nAES-Twofish<\/td>\n1.6<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Whirlpool<\/td>\nTwofish<\/td>\n1.6<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
RIPEMD-160<\/td>\nAES-Twofish-Serpent<\/td>\n1.5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Whirlpool<\/td>\nSerpent<\/td>\n1.5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
SHA-512<\/td>\nSerpent-AES<\/td>\n1.5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
RIPEMD-160<\/td>\nSerpent-Twofish-AES<\/td>\n1.5<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Whirlpool<\/td>\nAES<\/td>\n1.4<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
SHA-512<\/td>\nAES-Twofish-Serpent<\/td>\n1.3<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
SHA-512<\/td>\nSerpent-Twofish-AES<\/td>\n1.3<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Whirlpool<\/td>\nTwofish-Serpent<\/td>\n1.3<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Whirlpool<\/td>\nAES-Twofish<\/td>\n1.2<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Whirlpool<\/td>\nSerpent-AES<\/td>\n1.2<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Whirlpool<\/td>\nSerpent-Twofish-AES<\/td>\n1<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Whirlpool<\/td>\nAES-Twofish-Serpent<\/td>\n0.934<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

The upshot is that all of these are pretty slow, and all of them would be essentially unnoticeable for basic text file (or RTF) work. I wouldn\u2019t want to do image or audio processing with this encryption, but then I wouldn\u2019t want to do that on a Pi anyway.<\/p>\n

Method of Speed Assessment<\/h2>\n

I wanted a non-interactive way to perform the test, so I wrote this script. I am relying on the data reported by the TrueCrypt volume creation process. Because TrueCrypt writes a status to the terminal it produces output that is dreadful to process, so I wrote the little python script to produce a CSV from the log.<\/p>\n

The test was performed with an ARMv6 compatible processor rev 7 (v61) at 464.48 BogoMIPS. The OS is Debian GNU\/Linux 7.0 (Wheezy), which was installed as the 2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian image. I built TrueCrypt from source for 7.1a along with wxWidgets 2.8.12 (also built from source) and pkcs version 11.2.<\/p>\n

Shell Script<\/h3>\n

#!\/bin\/bash<\/p>\n

# Create a file of random elements, needs to be at least 300 bytes
\ndd if=\/dev\/random of=random bs=512 count=1<\/p>\n

# Iterate over the hash hash funnctions
\nfor HASH in RIPEMD-160 SHA-512 Whirlpool
\ndo
\n# Iterate over the available encryption algorithms
\nfor ENCALG in AES Serpent Twofish AES-Twofish AES-Twofish-Serpent Serpent-AES Serpent-Twofish-AES Twofish-Serpent
\ndo
\n# Write the algorithms to the log
\necho “Algorithms: $HASH $ENCALG” >> log
\n# TrueCrypt will report the performance in the output
\ntruecrypt -c \/home\/pi\/test.tc –filesystem=fat –size=10485760
\n–encryption=$ENCALG -p ppp –random-source=random
\n–hash=$HASH –volume-type=normal –non-interactive >> log
\n# Erase the created file
\nrm test.tc
\ndone
\ndone<\/p>\n

Python Reprocessor<\/h3>\n

import sys
\nfid = open( sys.argv[1], ‘r’)
\nlines = fid.readlines()
\nfid.close()<\/p>\n

speed = None
\nwhile len( lines) > 0:
\nline = lines.pop(0)
\nlls = line.strip()<\/p>\n

if lls.startswith( ‘Algo’):
\n# If we already have a speed, then print
\n# the last elements
\ntoks = lls.split()
\nif speed == None: # first record
\nalgo = “,”.join( toks[1:3])
\nelse:
\nprint algo,”,”,speed
\nalgo = “,”.join( toks[1:3])
\nelif lls.startswith( ‘Done’):
\ntoks = lls.split()
\nspeed = “,”.join(toks[-5:-3])
\nprint algo,”,”,speed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Note: The results in this post have been improved with more accurate values at Revised Raspberry Pi TrueCrypt Benchmark. I recently acquired a Raspberry Pi model B 512 MB from the excellent people at Adafruit. I am interested in it as a small computer for basic text processing, and am curious about its performance in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[19,26,44],"class_list":["post-582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-making","tag-benchmark","tag-encryption","tag-raspberrypi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inkofpark.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inkofpark.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inkofpark.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inkofpark.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inkofpark.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.inkofpark.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.inkofpark.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inkofpark.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.inkofpark.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}