Implementing Cryptography with OpenCL

Hi, all, welcome back to ICOC.

On the agenda today was scouring the web for tutorials to get familiarized with the OpenCL standard, and so far, I’ve found two tutorials that I want to try. One tutorial was written by a members of the Khronos Group, Rob Farber (which we’ll talk about later, but here’s a link now.), while the other was written by Erik Smistad.

The first tutorial I decided to implement was the one written by Erik Smistad, titled “Getting started with OpenGL and GPU computing.” This was an example that Dr. Marmorstein highlighted as we were forming the research project. The tutorial aims to add vectors contents together. While this can be done easily with a simple for loop, Smistad chooses to implement it using the OpenCL standard to allow for GPU computing. This will decrease the time it takes to compute the vector addition from linear, or O(n) with n being the size of the vectors, to relying on the number of cores in the processor instead, which can speed up the computation time.

Following Smistad’s guide, I was able to replicate this vectorAddition program, having created a main program and a kernel program to which the computation would occur in the GPU. The only issues that needed to be addressed were the facts that the OpenCL function “clCreateCommandQueue” is deprecated, and needed to be replaced with “clCreateCommandQueueWithProperties”, and the fact that the lab system I was using did not have an updated driver. Dr. Marmorstein is updating the drivers in all of the lab systems, which should fix that problem. Thankfully, one of the lab systems had the driver partially installed, so a remote login allowed me to compile the program.

Running the program, another problem appeared — when the program runs, the program will print out the given item at i in both vectors A and B, add them together, and print the result C in one line. However, all of the additions are wrong. They are either zero, or a ridiculously high number. At the moment, this does not appear to be user error, as Dr. Marmorstein was able to confirm the error, as well. Here’s hoping that the driver update will help this error somewhat…

That being said, that is all of the progress today. Tomorrow will be a day to work on more research and make sure that this tutorial is completed successfully.

Thank you, and see you next time!

Kyle Jenkins.

Time spent today: 1 hour 15 minutes
Total Time: 4 hours

Hi, all. Welcome back to ICOC.

Today was the day I worked to try and identify and solve why some of the tests for the header files of OpenCL failed to work. After digging through the files, the error was simply that I was not compiling the files correctly.

In retrospect, compiling every file individually and running these files to see if they passed was not a good choice. I went to Dr. Robert Marmorstein for advice, as I initially thought that it was simply an error on my end — either my system was not equipped with the necessary files, or I was not compiling correctly. It seems that the latter was correct, and with the cmake command, I was able to compile and successfully run each and every test header file.

Now that the header files are complete, next time will be devoted to making sure all of the necessary OpenCL files are ready to go, and if they are, search online for OpenCL tutorials to become familiar with the standard!

See you next time!

Sincerely,
Kyle Jenkins.

Time spent today: 1 hour 15 minutes.
Total Time: 2 hours 45 minutes.

Hello, all.

Today, I began setting up my system to be compatible for OpenCL.

I was having a bit of trouble finding materials and guides online, as results online did not paint a clear picture on where to find the necessary programs I needed. I wanted to find a Windows version, in case working on this project from a Linux system was impossible.

In my research, I managed to find the OpenCL repository from The Khronos Group on GitHub. I lifted the OpenCL-CCX and OpenCL-Headers repositories and migrated them to the Linux system. The Headers repository, in particular, has a directory filled with tests, that are designed to test the OpenCL header files so that they are working as intended. When running all the tests, all but four passed correctly. Three of them, unfortunately, did not compile correctly, while one of them ran successfully but did not pass.

Next time, I will continue to set up OpenCL on the system, with the main goal of the header tests working. Until then, see you next time!

Sincerely,
Kyle Jenkins.

Time spent today: 1 hour 30 minutes.
Total Time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

Hello, and again, welcome to Implementing Cryptography with OpenCL, or ICOC for short!

I am Kyle Jenkins, and I am tackling this project to gain more experience in programming in the graphical interface. The goal of the project is to implement a cryptographic hash in a graphic environment, rather than in the CPU, in order to encrypt and decrypt values. To do this, I will be using OpenCL and using the BLAKE2 hash function.

Open Computing Language, or OpenCL, is an open-source standard that allows for parallel and cross-platform programming. This standard will allow for a connection between the CPU and the graphical environments. This will be necessary to activate the cryptographic hash function that will be processed within the graphics card.

BLAKE2 is a cryptographic hash function that is at least as secure as and faster than SHA-3, another cryptographic hash function. It is also one of the hashing components of Wireguard, a VPN service. The BLAKE2 function will be implemented so that it will be processed using OpenCL in the graphics card.

The final goal is to be able to accurately write a complete algorithm that will hash values using the BLAKE2 function through the graphics card, using OpenCL as the parallel programming standard, and encrypt/decrypt the input into an output. The algorithm would first begin on the CPU with an input of the values to encrypt or decrypt. Then, the algorithm would call functions written to be processed within the graphical environment and create a BLAKE2 hash. Finally, the graphical environment would take the input and, using the hash, encrypt or decrypt the input and return the results as the output, back onto the CPU.

This blog will be where I post my progress as I research and develop this algorithm. Here, I will post results of my research, studies, and progress toward the algorithm. You can expect at the very least two posts during the business week and one post during the weekend!

Thank you for your interest in my project!

Sincerely,
Kyle Jenkins.