Comparison Studies between Pre-Shared and Public Key Exchange Mechanisms for Transport Layer Security

Abstract

The pre-shared key based mechanisms for Transport Layer Security (TLS) were recently standardized by the IETF to extend the set of ciphersuites by utilizing existing key management infrastructures. The benefit of pre-shared based mechanisms is the avoidance or reduction of the cryptographic operations used in public-key based mechanisms. However, so far there are no performance measurements for pre-shared key based ciphersuites available. In this paper, we present a systematic analysis and performance comparison between the pre-shared key exchange mechanisms and the standard public key exchange mechanisms in TLS. Our performance metrics are processing time and transmitted amount of data for a handshake establishment. Furthermore, the interaction between the overall TLS handshake duration and the network environment is evaluated. The results for different key exchange mechanisms are comparatively studied and the design choices of pre-shared key based key exchange mechanisms have been validated. Experimental results give details about the performance improvement of the pre-shared key based mechanisms compared to the standard public key based mechanisms.