School of Computer and Information Science, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia
Many standard cryptographic functions are designed to benefit from hardware specific implementations. As a result, there have been a large number of highly efficient ASIC and FPGA hardware based implementations of standard cryptographic functions. Previously, hardware accelerated devices were only available to a limited set of users. General Purpose Graphic Processing Units (GPGPUs) have become a standard consumer item and have demonstrated orders of magnitude performance improvements for general purpose computation, including cryptographic functions. This paper reviews the current and future trends in GPU technology, and examines its potential impact on current cryptographic practices.