Fusion is our own AES-GCM crypto, optimized for encrypting short blocks.

Design:

• Perform entire AEAD operation at once. Processing of AAD and AES calculation necessary for generating the GCM tag run in parallel with payload protection. Traditional AES-GCM implementations handle separately the processing of AAD, payload protection, GCM finalization, focusing on the efficiency of processing the payload. To paraphrase, in case of traditional implementations, some execution ports remain idle while AAD or GCM finalization is being processed, while fusion tries to make use of pipelined, hyper-scaler CPU through the entire process.
• Reduce GHASH once. Traditional AES-GCM implementations are designed to handle arbitrary sized AEAD blocks, and therefore periodically performs reduction (e.g., once per 6-8 blocks).
• Calculate QUIC header protection vector in parallel. For maximum throughput, AES calculation of multiple blocks has to be done in parallel (fusion (and OpenSSL) do 6 blocks at a time). That means that there is likely some wasted CPU resource, when doing less than 6 blocks at once. Fusion checks if there's such wasted resource, and uses that to calculate the header protection vector in parallel.
• Written using C, instead of assembly. Modern x86-64 CPUs have deep reorder buffers; there's less need to arrange the instructions precisely than there used to be.

Benchmark:

OpenSSL suffers from ~30% performance penalty when encrypting AEAD blocks of 1440 bytes compared to when encrypting 16KB blocks. With fusion, that overhead is reduced to ~10%. Fusion also succeeds in hiding the crypto overhead of header protection.

To reproduce the results, fusionbench.c is available for measuring the performance of fusion. openssl speed command can be used to measure OpenSSL AEAD performance, though it should be noted that the undocumented -aead option have to be used to measure the AEAD performance including the overhead of preprocessing and post-processing (e.g., IV setup, AAD processing, GCM finalization). "openssl 1.1.1g (aead)" shows the numbers with the -aead option being set, while "openssl1.1.1g (aesgcm-core)" shows the numbers without.

ToDo:

• add support for AES-256
• auto-expand the pre-computed data
• more tests, running OpenSSL in parallel