Benchmarking of open source big number arithmetic libraries

Cryptography and Encryption methods are means to ensure confidentiality of data transferred from one computer to another. While design of appropriate security protocols is vital for information security, making sure that they are implemented accurately and effectively is even more important. Effective implementation of encryption algorithms and security protocols involves implementing big number arithmetic library. The last decade has seen increased interest in open source software development and the process has led to availability of several big number arithmetic library. In this paper we benchmark efficiency of most popular big number arithmetic libraries based on CPU cycles and execution time.