[viff-devel] Speed of ElGamal encryption

[Janus Dam Nielsen]

Hi,

I have made some tests of ElGamal encryption in Python (with some  
nontrivial amount of help from Martin thanks)

First test was in bare Python, here an encryption took

                  time for 1 enc     time for 4*10^6 enc
Python  : 0,002980 sec :  approx. 3 hours and 20 min
GMPY   : 0,000535 sec :  35 min and 40 sec

All the timing is made on my elderly office machine.

Another possiblity I have not tested yet is to use the Dan Bernstein  
implementation of encryption based on elliptic curves. I guess that  
we can get some more speed from there.

However I think that 35 min is worth waiting for and that we can get  
further speed up using a better implementation, and using state-of  
the art machines.

--
Janus