[dm-crypt] LUKS & TrueCrypt – Speed Test
Jorge Fábregas jorge.fabregas at gmail.com
Thu Jul 28 01:18:24 CEST 2011
Hello everyone,
Inspired by this old blog post:
http://movingparts.net/2007/10/26/truecrypt-versus-luks-speed-test/
…I decided to perform some tests on my Fedora 14 box. This is not a
pro benchmark so be warned 🙂
Common Facts for both tests:
– source & destination filesystems were ext4
– destination is an external USB drive
– source data size is 143GB (a folder with lots of files & directories,
small & large files, regular data…)
– rsync was used to perform the actual copy
– I’m using an “encrypted partition ” (against an encrypted file)
– I did a test first with TrueCrypt and then with LUKS
– Between the above tests, I shut down the machine (to flush filesystem
cache).
– my system kernel: 2.6.35.13-92.fc14.i686
### TrueCrypt Results ####
I used AES-256 (XTS operation mode), hash algorithm: ripemd-160 and the
package was realcrypt-7.0a-1.fc14.i686
Output of time command after rsync finished:
real 105m22.211s
user 28m10.471s
sys 41m35.319s
### DM-Crypt LUKS Results ###
I used the defaults: AES-256 (CBC), sha1 for header hashing and the
package cryptsetup-luks-1.1.3-1.fc14.i686
Output of time command after rsync finished:
real 108m55.291s
user 28m6.534s
sys 42m53.400s
As you can see, there’s almost a 4 minute difference. I was expecting
LUKS to be faster (as dm-crypt is a kernel module) and TrueCrypt runs
mainly in user space isn’t it? Do you think the cipher operation modes
(XTS vs CBC) played a role in this difference? Have any of you performed
a similar test?
Regards,
Jorge
http://www.saout.de/pipermail/dm-crypt/2011-July/001838.html