T He P Erformance of C Ryptographic a Lgorithms in the a Ge of P Arallel C Omputing

ii Declaration I " Osama Khalifa " confirm that this work submitted for assessment is my own and is expressed in my own words. Any uses made within it of the works of other authors in any form e.g., ideas, equations, figures, text, tables, programs etc are properly acknowledged at any point of their use. A list of the references employed is included. Abstract This project addresses the problem of enhancing the performance of strong cryptographic algorithms, which are widely used and executed by almost all internet users. The project uses parallel computing as a means to improve performance. Especially nowadays that multi-core computer machines have become commonly available. Since the security level provided by most cryptographic algorithms depends on the difficulty of solving some computational problems, the developments in computer systems manufacturing will threaten people's security. Thus, it is very important to cope with this development and increase the security level by using stronger cryptographic algorithms with longer keys which in return will take longer to encrypt and decrypt data but also a much longer time to hack the cipher text. This project makes it possible for several internet users to use longer keys without being hampered by the bad performance. The resulted parallel algorithm(s) will be assessed by measuring the scalability and speedup features, moreover, it will be able to adapt to the increasing number of cores in a dynamic way. iv Acknowledgment