Secure Information Exchange and Performance Implications on Web Server: A Case Study of Secure Socket Layer Protocol

Simon Peter Khabusi, Rajni Jindal

Abstract: The recent trend in internet computing and web technology has facilitated steady growth of e-commerce transactions by most global companies. The vast amounts of critical data exchanged over the internet present many security issues. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol is one of the secure connection oriented protocols that enables safe and secure message transmission over the internet by ensuring data confidentiality, authentication and integrity of the communicating parties, that is web server and web client. Many researches have been undertaken on SSL protocol and its effects on web server performance. In this work, a detailed analysis of SSL protocol, its application in secure information exchange and performance implications on web server has been presented. To achieve this objective, we enabled SSL on Apache running on Windows deployment Server 2008 and captured the values of processor time, Network interface, memory available, and average disk queue length for different workloads using the Windows performance monitor and Nagios XI, the most powerful and trusted infrastructure monitoring tool on the market. The data obtained reveals that SSL protocol has detrimental effects on processor time with measurable effect on available memory bytes, whereas minimal effect on average disk queue length was observed. Conclusively, techniques such as distributed computing, SSL certificate reuse, downloading the RSA decryption function and use of Broadcom SSL 800 accelerator have been proposed to overcome the overhead on server performance.

Keywords: SSL Protocol, Web server performance, performance counters, security threats, security services