On the Delivered Performance of the

Today, computer and network security has received enormous amount of attention. In particular, security protocols and cryptographic operations are constantly employed to ensure authentic and private communications in the business world. However, the high cost associated with cryptographic operations has been a critical factor that has slowed down many transactions and has prevented security protocols from being widely enforced. For example, Web browsing using a secure protocol often results in slow responses as the Web servers frequently reach their capacities. The Sun Crypto Accelerator 1000 (Sun CA1000) is a hardware-based, high-performance cryptographic security solution that enables a Sun server to handle large client loads under security measures deployed using techniques such as the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol, which is commonly used in e-commerce environment. Many critical cryptographic functions employed by SSL can be off-loaded from a Web server to the Sun CA1000 board(s) and performed in high speed. The power of the Sun CA1000 solution takes the performance of a Sun-based secure Web server solution to the next level. Our evaluation shows that it delivers remarkable improvement on the performance of the Sun FireTM 6800 server. Each Sun CA1000 board can efficiently process 4400 RSA operations per second and 495 Mbps of Triple-DES data encryption, a performance that is 20 times and 8 times, respectively, faster than the performance of the host processor. With seamless integration, such optimization accelerates the Web server by more than 270% in our Web server benchmarks and allows the host processors to delegate themselves on other aspects of Web applications.