Questions tagged [performance]

How adding or changing the security policies of a system will affect the overall system performance. Note that most performance-related questions (incl. config setting of common crypto modules) are better suited for SuperUser, or ServerFault.

Performance refers to the runtime, CPU load, memory footprint, or database size or a system.

Security.StackExchange is happy to answer architecture-type questions about performance of security modules. For example, the following questions would be on-topic here:

  • How will enabling HTTPS affect my CPU load?
  • My database is getting large, does PCI allow deletion of data after a certain time?

Questions about configuring or measuring performance of specific technologies would be better suited for SuperUser or ServerFaullt. For example, the following would be off-topic here, but on-topic there:

  • How to reduce the network latency in LDAPS?
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Does the length of a password for Wi-Fi affect speed?

I work at a place that gives Wi-Fi to all the customers, with a password that is 19 characters long. A customer came in and claimed that because the password is long, it slows down the internet speed. Is there any truth to this claim?
user213838
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Why is asymmetric encryption less efficient than symmetric encryption?

It's common knowledge that asymmetric encryption is in general much more expensive to compute than symmetric encryption, thus common practice is to use asymmetric encryption to establish a symmetric key for bulk data exchange. I'm not finding any…
Izz
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Is anyone seeing a performance decrease after applying recent kernel patch fixing Meltdown and Spectre?

Our company has a lot of CPU intensive operations on our servers, so the performance decrease is a concern for the organization. We did the benchmarks, and it seems that performance is almost not affected. Initially it was stated that performance…
Jason Holcomb
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Do AES-NI instructions accelerate both AES-128 and AES-256?

I have a HW-accelerated AES processor. With that in mind, my first question would be: Do AES-NI instructions accelerate both AES -128 and AES -256 encryption / decryption? Secondly, if it is true, that these CPUs accelerate both lengths, why would…
Vlastimil Burián
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Intentionally slow decryption

We need to store the user ID of authors of messages in a database. It should be possible to find an author of a problematic message i.e. on police request in minutes, but it should be very hard to find all the messages of an author (because we have…
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What are the performance differences (for client and server) between DHE and ECDHE in TLS?

My question is about the client and server performance for (EC)DHE. I am having difficulties in understanding this picture (which is based on numbers from Ivan Ristic' book "Bulletproof SSL and TLS"). Let's start with the third row "RSA 2048, DHE…
HorstKevin
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Will HTTPS negotiations slow down as more domains are added to the certificate?

We run a store frontend with 15 different wildcard domains (*.foo.ie, *.foo.uk etc) in the certificate. We're considering adding the root domain (foo.ie, foo.uk) into the certificate, to let the store frontend handle the redirect to www.foo.* - or…
rln
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Is there a security difference between GPG signing a file directly or its SHA512SUM file?

I am about to decide what SHA-512 hash sum and / or GPG verification scheme I will choose. Let me present you with two options: Signing the 25 GB ~ 23 GiB (one file fit to a Blu-Ray) directly with: $ gpg --local-user <my_gpg_fingerprint> \ --sign…
Vlastimil Burián
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Does the HTTPS protocol consume a lot of CPU time?

If every TLS message has to be encrypted / decrypted by both hosts involved in the secure connection, is this consuming a lot of CPU time?
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Performances of dm-crypt vs. ecryptfs

The only information I found about the difference of performance between dm-crypt (LUKS mode) and ecryptfs is that given that ecryptfs operates at filesystem-level, it may be slower when doing operations on a lot of small files. Given that they both…
Hey
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Does jwt with asymmetric algorithm have a bad performance?

I'm using Envoy as the gateway of my micro-service backend. Envoy provides me the JWT mechanism, which means that with the help of a public key, Envoy can validate tokens generated with a private key. It works as expected. However, my colleague just…
Yves
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How can SSL improve page load times?

I just came across this statement on the CloudFlare SSL page: "Modern SSL can actually improve page load times." How can SSL improve page load times? Is there a situation where loading an HTTPS page could be faster than loading an HTTP-only page?
user2796
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Change from bcrypt hashes to sha1 or even plaintext, for performance

I developed an application that is similar in concept to an FTP server. There are several hundred user accounts, and it uses bcrypt to store hashed passwords. All user passwords are randomly-generated 128-bit v4 GUIDs. One feature of my application…
mappu
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How long does RSA encryption/decryption generally take?

I am going to encrypt and decrypt a base64 that's an image. Now it needs to be fast. How fast does it take to encrypt and decrypt a file with RSA-OAEP for example? And if it is too slow what is a faster (but still secure) alternative?
Alexander
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Algorithm and key size to choose for SSL certificates (security and CPU wise) in 2020 (using nginx)

I posted this question already on SO, but as it is not really a programmin question I thought it might be a better place to ask here: I want to setup a new SSL certificate store for generating SSL certs (server certs (nginx) and client certs…
gelonida
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