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The Cost of the "S" In HTTPS

Posted by timothy on from the not-insignificant dept.

An anonymous reader writes Researchers from CMU, Telefonica, and Politecnico di Torino have presented a paper at ACM CoNEXT that quantifies the cost of the "S" in HTTPS. The study shows that today major players are embracing end-to-end encryption, so that about 50% of web traffic is carried by HTTPS. This is a nice testament to the feasibility of having a fully encrypted web. The paper pinpoints also the cost of encryption, that manifests itself through increases in the page loading time that go above 50%, and possible increase in battery usage. However, the major loss due to the "S" is the inability to offer any in-network value added services, that are offered by middle-boxes, such as caching, proxying, firewalling, parental control, etc. Are we ready to accept it? (Presentation can be downloaded from here.)

3 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. Not Slashdot! by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Funny

    Are we ready to accept it?

    Slashdot certainly isn't ready!

    1. Re:Not Slashdot! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yes, clearly we must urgently encrypt all slashdot communication so that no-one can read the posts!

    2. Re:Not Slashdot! by Raumkraut · · Score: 3, Funny

      In the meantime, why don't you come join us at https://pipedot.org/? It has both UTF-8 and SSL support already.

      And for that matter so does Soylent News, which is even based on the same codebase as Slashdot!