On the Design and Performance of Chinese OSCCA-approved Cryptographic Algorithms

SM2, SM3, and SM4 are cryptographic standards authorized to be used in China. To comply with Chinese cryptography laws, standard cryptographic algorithms in products targeting the Chinese market may need to be replaced with the algorithms mentioned above. It is important to know beforehand if the replaced algorithms impact performance. Bad performance may degrade user experience and increase future system costs. We present a performance study of the standard cryptographic algorithms (RSA, ECDSA, SHA-256, and AES-128) and corresponding Chinese cryptographic algorithms. Our results indicate that the digital signature algorithms SM2 and ECDSA have similar design and also similar performance. SM2 and RSA have fundamentally different designs. SM2 performs better than RSA when generating keys and signatures. Hash algorithms SM3 and SHA-256 have many design similarities, but SHA-256 performs slightly better than SM3. AES-128 and SM4 share some similarities in the design. In the controlled experiment, AES-128 outperforms SM4 with a significant margin.