A hardware oriented analysis of cryptographic systems for multimedia applications

This paper presents a hardware-oriented complexity analysis of some of the most popular cryptographic algorithms. A sample algorithm has been chosen from each group in which cryptographic algorithms are usually classified: factorization problem, discrete logarithm problem, stream cipher, block cipher and hybrid systems. The analysis yields measures of the types and number of operations necessary to perform each algorithm providing a comparison among the different classes. Such analysis is particularly oriented toward the encryption of large volumes of data such as the ones found in multimedia applications. Moreover, these results suggest how significant increase in performance can be provided by specific hardware implementations.