Accelerating SSL with GPUs

Abstract

SSL/TLS is a standard protocol for secure Internet communication. Despite its great success, today's SSL deployment is largely limited to security-critical domains. The low adoption rate of SSL is mainly due to high computation overhead on the server side. In this paper, we propose Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) as a new source of computing power to reduce the server-side overhead. We have designed and implemented an SSL proxy that opportunistically offloads cryptographic operations to GPUs. The evaluation results show that our GPU implementation of cryptographic operations, RSA, AES, and HMAC-SHA1, achieves high throughput while keeping the latency low. The SSL proxy significantly boosts the throughput of SSL transactions, handling 21.5K SSL transactions per second, and has comparable response time even when overloaded.