Real-World Performance of Cryptographic Accumulators

Cryptographic accumulators have often been proposed for use in security protocols, and the theoretical runtimes of algorithms using them have been shown to be reasonably efficient, but their performance in the real world has rarely been measured. In this paper I analyze the performance differences between two cryptographic accumulator constructions, RSA accumulators and bilinear-map accumulators, based on a realistic practical implementation in C++. I first discuss the theoretical differences between the constructions and their runtimes, showing that both algorithms present the opportunity for parallel computation. Then I describe an experiment that measures the actual running time of these algorithms on current commodity hardware, and discuss the optimizations I was actually able to make in their code. Finally, I present and analyze the experimental results, which show that the bilinear-map accumulator performs faster than the RSA accumulator in almost all cases, and should be the preferred implementation for practical security systems as long as the size of the set to be accumulated can be given a reasonable