Accelerating AES in JavaScript with WebGL

Abstract

Cryptography is a fundamental building block for security sensitive Web applications. Because the architecture of JavaScript can not provide sufficient performance, the client-side web applications still lacks high performance cryptography primitives. In this paper we studied the feasibility of a new Web standard, i.e., the WebGL API for accelerating AES in JavaScript by exploiting the ability of GPU. We design and implemented AES using 128-bit key length. We compared the performance of our approach to the currently reported fastest pure JavaScript implementation and found our approach runs more than ten times faster in major browsers on all platform. Our work showed the potential optimization of using GPU via WebGL to accelerate JavaScript code. © Springer International Publishing 2013.