On Apr 15, 2009, at 6:11 PM, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
- The bandwidth overhead of SSL is negligible. Seriously.
A quote from an article about using SSL - <http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/news/interview/ 0,289202,sid26_gci995388,00.html>
" The increase in message size due to SSL is not very significant,
and is rarely a concern. "
It isn't a bandwidth issue, it is a data throughput issue at the
server and at the client.
The server has to calculate the encryption, and that takes time, so
the response from a server using SSL / TLS will lag compared to
unencrypted traffic. Likewise the browser has to decrypt the data, so
there is a lag while the local CPU does the calculations before it
can parse the HTML / JavaScript.
The length of those lags is dependent on the processing power at each
end, not dependent on bandwidth.
Here <http://www.webperformanceinc.com/web_stress_test/ performancerealistic.html#CPU>
you can see that a 2.4 GHz server can deliver better performance
serving encrypted traffic than a 800 MHz server serving unencrypted
traffic. Yeah, it's comparing a Fiat 500 to an Alfa-Romeo, but the
numbers comparing encrypted vs, unencrypted for each CPU are
interesting.
Although I am not that familiar with satellite links, I do know that
one of the biggest problems using satellite is latency. The lag at
the server while the encryption is being calculated is the pain
point; it adds to the latency problem.
I don't mean to be rude, but this is a bad idea,
I think it isn't such a good idea either.
If you have e-mail messages that fall under a NDA, you'd want that
connection encrypted at all times, not just to protect the
authentication.
If you have the time and the skill to hack on the code, this might be
doable, but what you are looking for isn't built in standard.