How "expensive" is crypto anyway?
Dec 28, 2017Vlad Krasnov
Summary
This post delves into the performance and cost of cryptographic operations within TLS deployments at Cloudflare's scale. It provides detailed profiling data on CPU usage for various ciphersuites, public key algorithms (RSA, ECDHE, ECDSA), and hash functions (SHA1, SHA2). The analysis highlights that while modern cryptography is generally efficient, RSA remains a significant resource consumer, and it advocates for the adoption of ECDSA certificates. The post also touches upon the future of TLS in the context of quantum computing, indicating proactive research into post-quantum cryptography.
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