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I'm doing a performance test on AES with CTR mode and HMAC SHA1 for message authentication and found the openssl speed tool for that.

I run multiple tests with openssl speed -evp sha1 aes-128-ctr aes-128-gcm because I want to compare it to the GCM mode which do encryption and message authentication in a single mode.

Now my question: how can I compare these values? Is the value of the sha1 result the "speed" of the combination of ctr + hmac sha1 because it's the bottleneck or do I have to subtract these two values to get the combined speed of ctr + hmac sha1?

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    $\begingroup$ HMAC-SHA-1 uses the double call of the SHA-1, one is long (almost hashes as same as the message size) and the other one is short, a single block of SHA1 (512-bit for SHA-1). Short messages suffer from initialization, you might need to consider your real case. For the interpretation of the output see How can I interpret openssl speed output? from Stack Overflow. This is mostly off-topic. $\endgroup$
    – kelalaka
    Feb 10, 2022 at 16:46
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    $\begingroup$ There aren't any AES-CTR cipher suites. Although CTR is used as underlying tech for GCM, the MAC authenticated ciphersuites are all based on CBC, unfortunately using MAC-then-encrypt. Of course, as CTR and CBC use as many block encrypts, the speed difference should be negligible for sane implementations (but there is a lot of insanity in this world). $\endgroup$
    – Maarten Bodewes ♦
    Feb 10, 2022 at 16:56
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    $\begingroup$ I’m voting to close this question because this is about interpreting the result of a cryptographic library. There is already HMAC speed on Stack Overflow already. $\endgroup$
    – kelalaka
    Feb 10, 2022 at 17:21

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Is the value of the sha1 result the "speed" of the combination of ctr + hmac sha1 because it's the bottleneck or do I have to subtract these two values to get the combined speed of ctr + hmac sha1?

First of all, you should use AES-CBC just to be sure that you are using the right combination of algorithms. AES-CBC is much slower than AES-CTR on my machine. This is probably due to buffering; it is possible to precalculate large parts of the key stream for AES-CTR.

TLS packets are usually about 1.5 K in size, so you could use the 1024 byte blocks as best indicator. I've done the speed test with SHA-1, AES-CBC as well as AES-GCM.

So let's use the following values:

SHA-1 (representing HMAC-SHA-1): 1467708 kB/s
AES-CBC                        : 1330523 kB/s
AES-GCM                        : 3346640 k

Instead of GB/s you should really be looking at ns per kB, that way you can add the processing time together and then calculate it back to GB/s as you want.

Now we can calculate the speed of SHA-1 + CBC by performing:

$$T_{SHA-1\&CBC} = {1 \over {1 \over T_{SHA-1}} + {1 \over T_{AES-CBC}}}$$

where $T$ is the transfer speed in bytes per second.

This will result in the following value: 697876kB/s for SHA-1 + AES-CBC. That means that AES-GCM is about 4.8 times faster than SHA-1 + AES-CBC for a normal, unthreaded implementation. This is assuming that HMAC has the same speed of SHA-1 (which is approximately true in all probability, even though it has to process a little more data).

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks alot for your detailed answer. The only thing I don't get is why you chose cbc mode? I chose ctr + hmac sha1 because thats the default for srtp protocol $\endgroup$
    – Soteri
    Feb 11, 2022 at 8:08
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    $\begingroup$ Ah, sorry, I thought that you'd use TLS, because you were referencing OpenSSL. I don't have much time right now, can you get along with the given answer to calculate the aggregate result? I presume that most protocols will not multi-thread for one specific connection, so it should in that case be a valid way of calculating the speed. $\endgroup$
    – Maarten Bodewes ♦
    Feb 11, 2022 at 9:14

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