TLS Goes Low Cost: When TLS Meets Edge

Recently, we have witnessed an upward trend in adopting the Transport Layer Security version 1.3 (TLS 1.3) to numerous applications (Google Cloud [25], Microsoft software products [20], CloudFlare [27]). Although TLS 1.3 provides higher efficiency than the previous versions of TLS, its handshake protocol still requires the server to send its certificate to the client which consumes a significant amount of network bandwidth. Moreover, the client becomes idle while it is waiting for the certificate to arrive. This latency is one of the causes of the TLS handshake delay. Adequate adoption of edge computing can increase the efficiency of traditional server client architectures. In this paper, we envision a new paradigm to adopt edge computing into TLS to improve the efficiency of session establishment. Our new architecture will motivate researchers to consider the edge in improving the TLS protocol in the future. TLS-EC (TLS with Edge Computing) protocol improves the TLS 1.3 handshake efficiency by reducing server-side certificate transmission overhead and network latency between server and client through edge computing. We also present the implementation of TLS-EC, which shows a reduction in both the handshake time and the bandwidth consumption between the server and the client during the TLS handshake. In particular, our experiments indicate that bandwidth consumption can be reduced by 33% and 49%, respectively, for ECDSA and RSA-based certificates with 128-bit security level compared to TLS 1.3 full handshake.