Meet the gKrypt engine, the world's first package to employ general purpose graphics units (GPGPUs) for data encryption, which is an important tool for information security. It uses an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) based 256-bit block cipher to provide robust security. In this Part 1 of a two-part series, explore the AES, the GPU port of the Rijndael algorithm for Linux®, the parallelizing of the AES algorithm, and the use of the gKrypt Engine supporting CUDA for NVIDIA-based GPUs.