Performance Comparison of Hyper-V and KVM for Cryptographic Tasks in Cloud Computing

As the extensive use of cloud computing raises questions about the security of any personal data stored there, cryptography is being used more frequently as a security tool to protect data confidentiality and privacy in the cloud environment. A hypervisor is a virtualization software used in cloud hosting to divide and allocate resources on various pieces of hardware. The choice of hypervisor can significantly impact the performance of cryptographic operations in the cloud environment. An important issue that must be carefully examined is that no hypervisor is completely superior in terms of performance; Each hypervisor should be examined to meet specific needs. The main objective of this study is to provide accurate results to compare the performance of Hyper-V and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) while implementing different cryptographic algorithms to guide cloud service providers and end users in choosing the most suitable hypervisor for their cryptographic needs. This study evaluated the efficiency of two hypervisors, Hyper-V and KVM, in implementing six cryptographic algorithms: Rivest, Shamir, Adleman (RSA), Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Triple Data Encryption Standard (TripleDES), Carlisle Adams and Stafford Tavares (CAST-128), BLOWFISH, and TwoFish. The study’s findings show that KVM outperforms Hyper-V, with 12.2% less Central Processing Unit (CPU) use and 12.95% less time overall for encryption and decryption operations with various file sizes. The study’s findings emphasize how crucial it is to pick a hypervisor that is appropriate for cryptographic needs in a cloud environment, which could assist both cloud service providers and end users. Future research may focus more on how various hypervisors perform while handling cryptographic workloads.