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Increase True Crypt AES performance


I used the new version of True Crypt to encrypt my new external hard drive which has become almost a standard procedure for me to do. Whenever I buy a new hard drive I encrypt it completely with True Crypt. I discovered by chance a way to increase the performance of the AES algorithm in True Crypt.

The solution is a little bit complicated because you have to compile a source to get it to work. The benefit however is a much better performance of that algorithm which has been programmed in Assembler in comparison to the one programmed in C that True Crypt is using by default.

The increase is amazing. The bandwidth increases by about 20 MB/s from 66 MB/s to 85 MB/s on the system of the user who discovered it. It depends on the hard drive of course but everyone should see a gain in the end.

true crypt benchmark

You will need the following to compile the algorithm source and True Crypt:

  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 with SP1
  • Microsoft Visual C++ 1.52
  • Windows Driver Development Kit (DDK) Vista Build 6000
  • YASM

You can read the full instructions in this thread. I was not able to locate a precompiled version of True Crypt with this faster AES algorithm yet. If anyone comes up with a trustworthy download source let me know. I unfortunately do not have Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.




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Categories: Security, software


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7 Responses to “Increase True Crypt AES performance”

  1. gokudomatic says:

    why won’t you give us a link to your compiled version?
    I haven’t and I don’t wanna install the gigantic visual studio just for one single compilation where I’m not even sure that will work at the first try.

  2. tash says:

    I’m surprised noone’s done this yet and posted a compiled version..
    When I get on my laptop later tonight with VS I’ll download the code and see if I can get it all to compile and work. I’ll try to optimize a 64bit version too.

    I’ll leave another comment if it all works out with the download links :]

  3. Martin says:

    That would be awesome Tash

  4. Martin says:

    A new True Crypt version has been released that is said to increase the AES performance in Windows by up to 90%. Maybe they did implement the faster algorithm ?

  5. tash says:

    You’re right Martin. The 5.1 version of truecrypt includes the asm implementation of aes that you linked to here. I figured something as easy as that would almost have to be adopted into their development

  6. Eugene says:

    Thank you Martin for this post

    Could you please help me.
    I’m trying to compile TrueCrypt for Windows but I found only MSVC 1.5 not 1.52. And during compilation of Boot project I got following error:

    fatal error C1008: no input file specified
    NMAKE : U1077: c:\msvc15\bin\cl.exe:

    during execution of
    c:\msvc15\bin\cl.exe /nologo /W2 /Fc /I “c:\msvc15\Include” /I”..\..\..” /I”..\..\..\Common” /I”..\..\..\Crypto” /D __int8=char /D __int16=int /D __int32=long /D BOOL=__int32 /D FALSE=0 /D TRUE=1 /D LITTLE_ENDIAN=1234 /D BYTE_ORDER=1234 /D TC_WINDOWS_BOOT /D TC_MINIMIZE_CODE_SIZE /D TC_NO_COMPILER_INT64 /D malloc=malloc_NA /AT /Zl /f- /G3 /Oe /Os /Ob1 /OV0 /Gs /Gf /Gy /D NDEBUG /D TC_ASM_PREPROCESS /P /EP “..\BootDefs.h”

    Should I find 1.52 of MSVC to fix this problem?

    Thank you

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