The case for ubiquitous transport-level encryption
Authors: A. Bittau, M. Hamburg, M. Handley, D. Mazières, and D. Boneh
Abstract:
Today, Internet traffic is encrypted only when deemed necessary. Yet
modern CPUs could feasibly encrypt most traffic and the cost of
doing so will only drop over time. Tcpcrypt is a TCP extension
designed to make end-to-end encryption of TCP traffic the default, not
the exception. Tcpcrypt has a number of features to facilitate
adoption. It provides backwards compatibility with legacy TCP stacks
and middleboxes. Because it is implemented in the transport layer,
it protects legacy applications. However, it also provides a hook
for integration with application-layer authentication, largely
obviating the need for applications to encrypt their own network
traffic and minimizing the need for duplication of functionality.
Finally, tcpcrypt lessens the impact of public key
cryptography by minimizing the cost of key negotiation to
servers. As a result, a server can accept 36 times more connections
per second with tcpcrypt than with SSL.
Reference:
In proceedings of Usenix Security 2010.
Full paper: pdf
Related papers: Please visit the tcpcrypt web site.