Measurement of performance impact of SSL on IP data transmissions

Secure socket layer (SSL) provides networking security at session layer of the ISO/OSI reference model. The paper deals with the problem of developing a measurement instrument for evaluating the performance of a communication system based on SSL 3.0 implemented by the SSLeay library. The developed measurement instrument is able to evaluate the maximum throughput obtainable in such a communication system and allows users to carry out an experimental investigation on the throughput variations when the encryption algorithms used for confidentiality are changed. Moreover, for the various ciphers analyzed, the performance improvement gained by increasing the CPU clock frequency has been estimated.