Hermetica

Hardware-Accelerated File Encryption and Decryption

Overview

Hermetica is a high-performance Rust application for rapid file encryption and decryption. It leverages hardware acceleration and efficient multithreading to maximize performance across all available CPU cores.

Important Security Disclaimer: Hermetica uses a custom, from-scratch AES-GCM implementation. It has not undergone formal security audits and is not recommended for production or security-critical applications without thorough review and testing.

Key Features

• Hardware acceleration using x86 AES-NI and PCLMULQDQ instruction sets
• Highly efficient multithreading utilizing all available CPU cores
• Seamless integration of Rust and x86 assembly for optimal performance

Technical Details

• Algorithm: AES-GCM
• Hardware Requirements: x86 processor with AES-NI and PCLMULQDQ support
• Tools used:
  • Rust for application logic and safe concurrency
  • x86 Assembly for performance-critical cryptographic operations
• Concurrency Model: Rust's std::thread for low-overhead parallel processing

Performance

Hermetica is engineered for speed and efficiency:

• Fully utilizes all available CPU threads for parallel processing
• Dedicated instruction sets significantly outperform plain software implementation
• Performance is orders of magnitude faster than Rayon-based parallelism
  • For this specific use case rayon did not yield performance improvements
• Speed limited by disk I/O operations
  • Cryptographic operations are highly optimized and intensive computation is not the limiting factor

Getting Started

1. run cargo install hermetica

Usage

Hermetica provides simple command-line operations for file encryption and decryption:

• Encryption: hermetica -e <file>
• Decryption: hermetica -d <file>

Limitations and Considerations

• Compatible only with x86 processors supporting AES-NI and PCLMULQDQ instructions
• Not suitable for production or security-critical applications without thorough review and testing

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 (GPLv3). See the LICENSE file for full details.