TLS 1.3 is the latest version of the SSL/TLS specification. There are significant changes to messages and the message flow. These changes are targeted at security and performance. This series of blogs will discuss the performance differences observed between TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3 in wolfSSL and how to make the most of them in your applications. This is the first part of six blogs.
The first performance difference to note is a degradation. In TLS 1.2 performing a resumption handshake is very quick. This comes at a security cost though. Each time a client resumes a session, the same session ID is used and the same master secret is used. Therefore, if the master secret is compromised then all resumed sessions are revealed. Also, TLS 1.2 resumption is stateful and can have performance issues in a multi-server architecture.
TLS 1.3 only uses session tickets to resume a session. This mechanism has the client send an opaque session ticket to the server that contains a server encrypted version of all the information required to resume the session. Once again the same master secret is used across handshakes but the default behavior is to perform a key exchange. A unique, shared secret is generated and combined with the master secret when calculating keys and IVs. This mechanism then provides forward secrecy.
The performance trade-off here is that using a session ticket requires decryption of the session ticket. Also, TLS 1.3 performs more encryption/decryption and hashing operations in the handshake anyway. Therefore, when running a client and server on the same computer, a TLS 1.3 handshake is more than 20% slower. On a high latency network, these will not be noticeable as symmetric cipher and digest algorithms are the fastest of operations.
But also consider the default behaviour that results in a key exchange. DH key and secret generation are some of the most expensive operations and the handshake, again running both client and server on the same computer, using 2048-bit DH parameters can take 13 times as long as TLS 1.2 resumption. ECDH can be used instead and is at least twice as slow when using a highly optimised implementation.
There is no way in TLS 1.3 to avoid this performance degradation and resumption has the fastest handshake performance. Using optimised ECDH will give you the best performance and better security. There is a way to improve the resumption performance, in some cases, which will be discussed in a future blog in this series.
The next blog will discuss performance improvements in full handshakes performing server-only authentication. Stay tuned!
For more information about wolfSSL and TLS 1.3 session ticket resumption, please contact facts@wolfssl.com.