SqlCredit Part 7: Performance Impact of EncryptByCert and DecryptByCert

July 27, 2007

This is part 7 of a series. If you have not read part 6, you can find it here.

Let’s Get This Out Right Away

The task here is to determine the performance impact of EncryptByCert and DecryptByCert. In short, the cost is high. Microsoft acknowledges this in the Remarks section of Books Online’s coverage of EncryptByCert, but it is not a well-publicized limitation:

This function encrypts data with the public key of a certificate. … Such asymmetric transformations are very costly compared to encryption and decryption using a symmetric key. Asymmetric encryption is therefore not recommended when working with large datasets such as user data in tables.

I searched for articles that dealt with EncryptByCert and DecryptByCert and found a number of places where people discuss the functionality with no mention of the “large datasets” limitation.

The net is that EncryptByCert and DecryptByCert work for small bits of sensitive data but are inappropriate for use in high-volume tables like Card.

Never Fear, We Do Have Options

These performance results are valuable, even if they make it clear that we need another solution. Next month, I will change all the EncryptByCert and DecryptByCert calls to EncryptByKey and DecryptByKey (symmetric encryption) and use the tests created here to allow direct comparisons.

Performance Testing

What I did was build a test that gives an indication of the performance hit when using EncyptByCert and DecryptByCert. All of the code is included, so please do download the code and try it out yourself. I do not have access to any heavy machinery that I can play with, so if you run these tests on some high-powered system with a SAN, please share your results in the forum.

The test results here are from two different desktop-class systems. The first is my primary development system; the second is a “sandbox” I set up to try SQL Server 2005 before it was released. (As soon as I have time, I will be loading the SQL Server 2008 CTP on that system so I can check out the Resource Governor).

The Tests

The tests are fairly simple. They create two tables, one with encryption (CardEncrypt) and one without (CardNoEncrypt).

	CREATE TABLE dbo.CardNoEncrypt (
	    CardID         int             NOT NULL  IDENTITY,
	    CardNumber1    bigint          NOT NULL,
	    CardNumber2    bigint          NOT NULL,
	    CardNumber3    bigint          NOT NULL,
	    CardNumber4    bigint          NOT NULL,
	    SecurityCode1  smallint        NOT NULL,
	    SecurityCode2  smallint        NOT NULL,
	    SecurityCode3  smallint        NOT NULL,
	    SecurityCode4  smallint        NOT NULL,
	    SecureString1  varchar(36)     NOT NULL,
	    SecureString2  varchar(36)     NOT NULL,
	    SecureString3  varchar(36)     NOT NULL,
	    SecureString4  varchar(36)     NOT NULL,
	
	    CONSTRAINT CardNoEncrypt_PK
	    PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (CardID)
	) ON [SqlCredit_FG1];
	
	CREATE TABLE dbo.CardEncrypt (
	    CardID         int             NOT NULL  IDENTITY,
	    CardNumber1    varbinary(128)  NOT NULL,
	    CardNumber2    bigint          NOT NULL,
	    CardNumber3    bigint          NOT NULL,
	    CardNumber4    bigint          NOT NULL,
	    SecurityCode1  varbinary(128)  NOT NULL,
	    SecurityCode2  smallint        NOT NULL,
	    SecurityCode3  smallint        NOT NULL,
	    SecurityCode4  smallint        NOT NULL,
	    SecureString1  varbinary(128)  NOT NULL,
	    SecureString2  varchar(36)     NOT NULL,
	    SecureString3  varchar(36)     NOT NULL,
	    SecureString4  varchar(36)     NOT NULL,
	
	    CONSTRAINT CardEncrypt_PK
	    PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (CardID)
	) ON [SqlCredit_FG3];

There is an index on CardNoEncrypt (CardNumber1, SecurityCode1) but no corresponding index on CardEncrypt.

In a real application, you would not want to encrypt every column in a table, so CardEncrypt includes three encrypted columns (a bigint, a smallint, and a varchar(36)) while the rest are unencrypted.

Test Steps:

• Insert n records into each table.
• Read n random records by ID.

Each test is separated by a five-second delay to allow the system to settle between tests.

To run the tests, run BuildSqlCredit.bat, then EncryptPerfTest_Setup.sql, and finally EncryptPerfTest_Test.sql. The Test script has one important parameter that maps to the n, above: @createMax. The tests were run with it set to 10,000, but when you run it on your own system, set it low to start with.

The Systems

Common
       SQL Server 2005 SP2
       Windows XP Professional

System 1
       CPU: Single P4, 2.66 GHz
       Memory: 2 GB
       Hard Drives: One physical drive

System 2
       CPU: Single P4, 3.0 GHz HT
       Memory: 1.5 GB
       Hard Drives: Two physical drives (SQL, OS, and logs on C:, data on D:)

The Results

System 1 CPU Graph:

System 1 Statistics:

System 2 CPU Graph:

Note that the cycling during the “Read Encrypted” phase was consistent throughout the test. It did not show up when all filegroups were on the same physical drive.

Here is the same test on the same computer when all filegroups were on C:

System 2 Statistics (single hard-drive):

System 2 Statistics (two physical hard-drives):

As you can see, the write performance is not bad, but the read performance is significantly slower. The CPU hit is unacceptable.

One Running Change

• Now setting “READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT ON” based on this posting by Lubor Kollar. (What do you think about NOLOCK and the arguments against it?)

For Next Time

Change all the EncryptByCert and DecryptByCert calls to EncryptByKey and DecryptByKey (symmetric encryption) and use the tests created here to allow direct comparisons. Encryption and decryption using symmetric keys is the recommended approach when dealing with large amounts of data. Here is the quote from the Books Online’s coverage of EncryptByKey:

Symmetric encryption and decryption is relatively fast, and is suitable for working with large amounts of data.

One very serious limitation here is that EncryptByCert, EncryptByKey, EncryptByAsymKey, and EncryptByPassPhrase all create different results (ciphertext) each time they are called. We will discuss message authentication codes as a way to allow indexed look-ups of encrypted data.

Not covered yet: Last month, I said “I really don’t like passing actual numbers around for StatusCd. I will change that to use UDFs to translate between numbers and their corresponding status strings.” We’ll get to that eventually, but for now, the focus is on encryption.

References

NOLOCK

• Microsoft SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team: Previously committed rows might be missed if NOLOCK hint is used
• Craig Freedman's WebLog: Query Failure with Read Uncommitted

Download the code.

» See All Articles by Columnist Rob Garrison