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Age Encryption Benchmarks

Test Environment

Hardware Acceleration: AES-NI, VAES (AVX-512), AVX2, SHA-NI, AVX-VNNI

Methodology

Tests performed on /tmp (tmpfs) to eliminate disk I/O bottlenecks.

Test Data

• Small files: 100 files each of 1K, 10K, 100K, 500K, 1M
• Large files: Single files of 10M, 50M, 100M, 500M

Results

Encryption Performance (No TPM)

Small files (100 files batch):

Large files:

Decryption with TPM

Small files (10 files sample):

Large files:

TPM Overhead

Isolated TPM key unwrapping: 415 ms per operation

This represents the fixed cost of TPM communication regardless of file size.

Analysis

Throughput Scaling

Encryption throughput increases with file size:

• Small files: I/O overhead dominates
• Large files: Approaches ~750 MB/s sustained

TPM Impact

The TPM adds a fixed ~415 ms overhead to every decryption operation:

Comparison

Raw Data

operation,file_size,file_count,total_ms,per_file_ms,throughput_mbps
encrypt,1K,100,519,5.2,
encrypt,10K,100,536,5.4,
encrypt,100K,100,558,5.6,
encrypt,500K,100,650,6.5,
encrypt,1M,100,787,7.9,
encrypt,10M,1,26,26,384
encrypt,50M,1,101,101,495
encrypt,100M,1,183,183,546
encrypt,500M,1,665,665,751
decrypt_tpm,1K,10,4161,416,
decrypt_tpm,10K,10,4158,415,
decrypt_tpm,100K,10,4137,413,
decrypt_tpm,10M,1,442,442,22
decrypt_tpm,50M,1,519,519,96
decrypt_tpm,100M,1,614,614,163

Conclusions

1. Symmetric encryption: Sustains 400-750 MB/s depending on file size
2. TPM overhead: Fixed ~415 ms cost per decryption
3. Batch efficiency: Amortize TPM cost by processing multiple files per session

For interactive use (SSH keys, .env files), ~415 ms latency is acceptable. For high-throughput applications, keep decrypted keys in memory during sessions.