Further BigInteger performance improvements (original) (raw)

Florian Weimer fw at deneb.enyo.de
Sun Jun 7 17:46:21 UTC 2009

Florian Weimer wrote:

To provide some more background, most of us probably worry about BigInteger performance in the 512 to 2048 bit range because that's the range used for RSA cryptography (assuming that Java uses the Chinese Reminder Theorem optimization for private key operations). I understand the importance of this range in cryptography, and I especially understand the greater importance of the even smaller range that actually makes up the bulk of CPU time spent in cryptography, down in the 128-256 bit sizes. Most practical crypto schemes tend to use those public-key algorithms with numbers of 512 to 4096 bits for the initial key exchange, but then use something like 256-bit AES for encrypting the actual data stream.

The symmetric algorithms relevant in practice (such as AES) don't do arithmetic on big integers.

Your To: line was wildly wrong, I tried to correct that.

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