Originally posted by: Anh Tuyen Tran

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a US government standard for encryption, and is widely used by the US government and industries around the world. It protects classified information and sensitive data. IBM XL compilers for C/C++ and Fortran provide support for AES built-in functions on Linux (both little endian and big endian systems) and AIX. Using the IBM POWER8 built-in functions, AES applications can achieve high performance on IBM POWER8 processors.

My article about AES built-in functions has just been published on developerWorks. It provides a detailed analysis about the new AES built-in functions provided by IBM XL compilers. It explores the code that the compilers generate to demonstrate the performance gained by using the built-in functions. This is critical for high-performance AES applications, especially when many of them cannot be parallelized due to the nature of operation modes, such as chaining mode [for example, cipher block chaining (CBC) and propagating cipher block chaining (PCBC)] or feedback mode [cipher feedback (CFB) and output feedback (OFB)].

For more details, please visit Achieving high performance for Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) applications