SSLShader: Cheap SSL Acceleration with Commodity Processors

Abstract

Secure end-to-end communication is becoming increasingly important as more private and sensitive data is transferred on the Internet. Unfortunately, today's SSL eployment is largely limited to security or privacycritical domains. The low adoption rate is mainly attributed to the heavy cryptographic computation overhead on the server side, and the cost of good privacy on the Internet is tightly bound to expensive hardware SSL accelerators in practice. In this talk, we present high-performance SSL acceleration using commodity processors. First, we show that modern graphics processing units (GPUs) can be easily converted to general-purpose SSL accelerators. By exploiting massive computing parallelism of GPUs, we accelerate core cryptographic operations beyond what state-of-the-art CPUs provide. Second, we build a transparent SSL proxy, SSLShader, that carefully leverages the trade-offs of recent hardware features such as AES-NI and NUMA architecture and achieves both high throughput and low latency. In our evaluation, the GPU implementation of RSA shows a factor of 21.8 to 30.4 improvement over the fastest CPU implementation. SSLShader achieves 26.7 K transactions per seconds for small files while it can transfer large files at 13 Gbps on a commodity server machine. These numbers are comparable to high-end commercial SSL appliances at a fraction of their price.

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