Network Security and Cryptography: With the increase in e-commerce and other transactions in enterprise applications, the demand for higher-performing, secure, and scalable communications is on the rise. From a hardware perspective, as the communication load increases, load balancing is typically accomplished by adding more processors.

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by Muneesh Nagpal, server applications engineer, Core Software Division; Gururaj Nagendra, senior software engineer and architect, Software Products Division, SSG; and Alexey Omeltchenko, software engineer, Software Enabling Division, Intel Corp.

This simple optimization walk-through improves an already-optimized sample OpenSSL application's performance by 35 percent using Intel® cryptography library functions.

With the increase in e-commerce and other transactions in enterprise applications, the demand for higher-performing, secure, and scalable communications is on the rise. From a hardware perspective, as the communication load increases, load balancing is typically accomplished by adding more processors.

From a software standpoint, securing transactions using Secure Sockets Layer is very compute-intensive and can slow down the performance of the system, which in turn can have a negative effect on scalability. Organizations need cost-effective and flexible hardware solutions that meet their demands, and application developers need a robust cryptography library implementation that is easy to use for creating secure, high-performing applications.

The 64-bit Intel Itanium® 2 processor offers excellent price/performance and scalability for deploying secure enterprise-scale applications. The Itanium 2-based platform has superior built-in hardware security features that benefit all operating-system installations. To increase the value-add to the software developer, Intel Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel IPP) version 4.0 introduced the cryptography function domain.

Intel Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel IPP) cryptography functions
The Intel IPP cryptography function domain is a suite of pre-built public-key, symmetric and hashing functions that conform to the U.S. Government's National Institute of Standards and Technology Federal Information Processing Standards specifications. It enables fast and robust development of security software solutions for authentication, to ensure data confidentiality, and to maintain data integrity.