Not a question I ever thought I would find myself asking, nor to be fair finding myself intrigued by the answer. Not even if we got into the hypothetical territory of quantum encryption where those wearing the white coats and bemused expressions will happily tell you that every possible encryption key can be tested simultaneously, resulting in encryption, and of course decryption, before you can stifle the yawn.

However, perhaps it is because it is a slow news day or I the fact that I need to get something geeky into my system following the mind-numbing experience that is shopping at Tesco, but a press release from Protegrity Corporation and Teradata managed to get me considering the speed of encryption question.

It would seem, in the case of the Protegrity/Teradata data security management partnership at any rate, the answer is more than 9 million encryptions per second. Decryption performance is lacking though, at just 6 million decryptions per second. Oh the shame!

The speeds were reported after testing carried out using a Protegrity Defiance data Protection System combined with Teradata User Defined Functions in order to embed encryption and decryption functionality within a database. The parallel architecture and high performance UDF implementation allows for a highly efficient execution utilising industry standard AES-256 encryption and a six node Teradata 5550 platform with 12 Intel Xeon processors.

All very impressive stuff. But when it comes to encryption speed records I guess it all comes down to how you do the measuring, the metric that you use. For sure, 9 million encryptions per second is a good one, no doubt about that. However, it just doesn’t seem to carry the same gravitas as creating an encryption key at 4 million bits per second over a distance of 1km. Now that has a certain Olympic feel about it, conjuring up images of some nerdy guy reciting the value of Pi to a million digits while running a marathon at the same time. That’s the kind of speed record I am talking about.

Unfortunately, when the people behind the record actually do start talking about it you might wish you hadn’t asked. How about “The NIST fiber QKD system has two channels operating over optical fibers that are wrapped around a spool between two personal computers in a laboratory. The photons are sent in different quantum states, or orientations of their electric field, representing 0 and 1. The system compensates for temperature changes and vibration, which could affect performance, with a NIST-designed module that automatically adjusts photon orientation on a time schedule” for starters?