Parallelization of Prime Number

Generaton Using Message Passing

Interface
By Izzatdin Abdul Aziz
Nazleeni Samiha Haron
Low Tang Jung
Wan Rahaya Wan Dagang
Outline

 Problems
 Related Work
 Proposed Approach
 Cluster Platform
 Example of Application : RSA Cryptosystem
 Results and Discussion
 Evaluation
 Conclusion
 Q&A
 References
Problems To Address

• Cryptosystem requires massive computational power.

– Length of key is critical to determine the susceptibility of a

cipher to exhaustive attacks.

– Lengthier key promises more security. Process of

generating longer key requires higher computational power
(speed/time).

– Longer key can be generated by having strong/large prime

numbers
Problems To Address (Con’t)

• Processing power using sequential machine is

insufficient to generate large prime numbers.

– Highly depending on constraints of sequence

generation

F1 E1 F2 E2 F3 E3 … F: Fetch
Time E: Execute
Related Work

• Most of related works were focusing on improving the prime

number generation algorithm and the hardware architecture for
running the algorithm than focusing on parallelization of the
algorithm. The works include :
– Joye et al (2000) have designed an efficient prime number
generation scheme based on pseudo-number generation but
however still using sequential method.
– Tan et al (2000) have designed a parallel pseudo-random generator
for monte carlo simulation and not for cryptography.
– Cheung et. al (2004) have proposed a scalable hardware
architecture in improving the prime number generation process.
– GIMPS is a clustered workforce in finding Mersenne prime number.
Proposed Approach

• HPC and Cluster Architecture are proposed to reduce

prime number generation processing time.
– Increasing computational speed by performing more than
one computation concurrently.

101 101

001

101001100101010 E^&FHAGAK#^Y!
Data Encrypted Data
010
100
Cluster Platform
• Programming language used, C
• Library used, MPI
• Linux Platform , a cluster running ROCKS
• PC specs;
> 20 SGi Machines
> Pentium 3 Dual Processor 733 Mhz
> ͌ 0.28 FLOPS per Mega Hertz Per Processor
> NIC 10/100 Mbps Ethernet
Example of Application : RSA Cryptosystem

• Public key encryption and digital signatures.

• Security feature is based on difficulty of factoring large
integers.
• The algorithm of RSA:
n = pq
modulus n; theta = (p-1) (q-1)
e<n, such that gcd(e,theta) =1
d = e-1 (mod theta)
public key (n,e) private key (n,d)
C = m^e mod n
M = C^d mod n
Example of Application : RSA Cryptosystem
• Let say Alice want to send a private message to Sara. Message “m” is ‘6’. A
pair of prime numbers chosen are p = 7 and q = 19.
– n = p*q, n = 133
– theta = (p-1)*(q-1) = (7-1)*(19-1) = 108
– e <n, such that gcd(e,theta) = 1; e = 5,
– d = e-1 % theta, d=65
• Ciphertext = me % n
= 65 % 133
= 7776 % 133
= 62

• Original Message = cd % n
=6265 % 133
=2666%133
=6
Result and Discussion

• security of RSA depends on the difficulty of factoring the

modulus n back into its constituents.

• it is always suggested to choose ‘strong’ key primes to

generate the modulus n

• Generating large modulus will slow down the operation of RSA

• Parallel processing and cluster computing can be applied to

accelerate processing time.
Sequential Encryption Algorithm
 Proposed Parallel
Encryption Algorithm
Implementing Parallelism

• Once a random number have been generated,

master node will create a table of dynamic 2D array.

• Which later will be populated with odd numbers.

• A pointer-to-pointer variable **table in master, will point

to an array of pointers that subsequently points to a number
of rows.

• This will result in a table of dynamic 2D array.

• After the table of dynamic 2D array is created, master node

will then initialize the first row of the table only.
Implementing Parallelism

Example of generating prime numbers for a table consist of 12000

rows by 4 processors (nodes)
Implementing Parallelism

• The parallel segment begins when master node broadcasts the

row[0] to all nodes by using MPI_Bcast.

• This row[0] will be used by each node to continue populating the

rest of the rows of the table with odd numbers.

• Master node will then equally divide n-1 number of rows left that is
yet to be populated by number of nodes available in the grid cluster.

• Each node will be given an equal number of rows to be populated

with odd numbers. This could be achieved by using MPI_Send
Implementing Parallelism

• Prime numbers will be generated both by master and slaves

Evaluation

Table 1: Comparison of Execution Time for Different Number of Nodes.

Number of Execution
nodes Time (ms)
1 7.850
3 0.039
5 0.043
10 0.053
30 0.093
Evaluation (con’t)

• The performance of UTP grid experimental platform is as follows:

20 nodes * 2 processors * 733MHz * 0.28 FLOPS/cycle = 8.206 GFLOPS
• Running the algorithm in parallel mode has accelerated the prime
number generation process.

• However, it seems like there is a noticeable degradation in

performance when the program is running more than 3 nodes.

• The execution time has recorded to be lower when more nodes

participated in the generation process.

• This may be caused by the network latency during the distribution

of the task, which leads to the increased of time taken for the
communication between nodes.
Evaluation (con’t)

Time taken for MPI_BCAST and MPI_GATHER running on 15 nodes.

Time (Seconds) • Broadcast was massive for the first

0.045 node and deteriorated as it
0.0385

approached the last node.

0.0359

0.0354

0.04
0.0325

0.0318

0.0303

0.035
0.0293

• This may due to the frequent prime

0.0273
0.0273

0.0264
0.0254

0.0253

0.03
0.0247

numbers discovered at the beginning

0.025
of the number series and becomes
0.02
scarces as the numbers becomes
0.0142

0.0137

0.015
larger towards the end.
0.01

0.005 • This will prove that the relative

frequency of occurrence of prime
0

0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Node
numbers decreases with size of the
number
 Conclusion

1) Use other primality test that is more significant or feasible

for large prime number generation such as Rabin-Miller
algorithm.

2) Use other random number generation that can produce

random numbers with less computation yet provides higher
security level.
References
Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS