Analyzing the performance characteristics of modern web encryption and designing high-concurrency cryptographic offload engines.
TLS 1.3 dramatically improved web security and performance by removing insecure cipher suites and reducing handshake roundtrips to 1-RTT (and 0-RTT for resumed sessions). However, the elimination of static RSA key exchange in favor of mandatory ephemeral Diffie-Hellman (ECDHE) requires computing asymmetric key exchanges for every new session. NetworkHSM offloads this burden from edge web servers.
NetworkHSM interfaces with reverse proxies (Envoy, Nginx, HAProxy) via kernel-bypass DPDK drivers and asynchronous OpenSSL engines. Handshake requests are dispatched directly into hardware queues, returning shared secrets in less than 12 microseconds without blocking host event loops.
TLS 1.3 0-RTT early data is inherently vulnerable to network replay attacks. NetworkHSM implements an in-memory, hardware-synchronized Bloom filter and strike register that tracks recent client ticket nonces, instantly rejecting duplicate 0-RTT requests.