[erlang-questions] SSL performance

[Jesper Louis Andersen]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 4:29 PM, Andreas Schultz <aschultz@REDACTED> wrote:

> So, don't blame the speed on the cryptographic library, but on the
> interface to it.


This should perhaps have been in a highlighted position. Yes, indeed, the
interface is the problem. Since `ssl`, the Erlang application is using this
interface however, it becomes a bound on the speed, which was kind of the
primary point.

The secondary point about enacl is that we can do better, much better. The
salsa20 suite of ciphers (salsa20, xsalsa20 and chacha20) are all
considerably faster than AES, even with optimizations, for the same or
better security margin. Combined with a bad interface, the speed difference
becomes noticable to the point where it begins to matter. Enacl could be
optimized further and currently includes a tradeoff where it copies the 200
megabytes for a nicer interface. Exposing a worse interface could avoid
that copy altogether for really speed-sensitive programs.

Of couse I'm biased :P


-- 
J.
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