Re: Dealing with SSL processing via hardware

Dennis Landi wrote:
Is there any way for an external client to know how the SSL processing is occurring on the server (whether via software or hardware)?

That probably depends on the hardware.

* If the "hardware" is basically just a single CPU computer with Linux and OpenSSL installed on ROM wrapped in a sealed box, then I would suppose you could emulate the exact same performance characteristics by adding another CPU to your main server computer and only using that CPU for running the same SSL and socket software you would have inside the sealed box. IOW the answer would be "no".

* If the hardware is "proper hardware" meaning parallel dedicated chips for each supported algorithm (RSA, SHA-1, MD5, AES, DES etc) and multiple CPUs for SSL protocol processing, then I would assume you can write an external client that is able to spot it using statistical analysis of rather modest amounts of data. That external client would simply test if a second (or third or fourth etc, depending on the number of CPUs on the server) request using a separate socket, connecting immediately after the SSL handshake of the first connections finished, would slow down a first request. If it doesn't on average slow down the response to the first request, then the server is most likely using a SSL accelerator. Otherwise the server is most likely not using a SSL accelerator.
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