A memory management model for cryptographic software libraries

Abstract

Cryptographic protocols are implemented on the abstraction of multiple precision number libraries in which the dominant design criterion mostly turns out to be the maximization of the system performance. In contrast, each protocol may have its own memory usage pattern. In general case, the memory allocation and release routines are frequently called during the runtime. For this reason, an improper memory management strategy may yield an inefficient implementation. In this paper, we propose a memory management technique which is constructed under the consideration of the context of high level cryptographic software running on multi-programmed environments. Also, we show the implementation results of our approach and discuss with respect to the common static and dynamic memory allocation strategies. © 2008 Atilla Elçi.