Analysis of the Cost/Performance Tradeoffs of SSL Acceleration

Business-to-business (B2B) and Business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions in public domains such as Internet require secure communications mechanisms and, especially for applications accessible through web browsers, the secure socket layer (SSL) protocol is one of the most viable solutions to provide the required level of confidentiality, message integrity and endpoint authentication. The two main alternatives for providing SSL security are the end-to-end and the accelerated architectural solutions, which enable different cost-performance tradeoffs, where performance is intended as the overall delay that the customer experiences to complete the transaction. In this paper, we provide an analytical model for the computation of performance and cost of both the end-to-end and of the accelerated SSL system architectures. In this way, the designer is provided with a tool for the identification of the most economic system configuration providing the desired performance level.