Analysis of the Performance and Security of J2SDK 1.4 JSSE Implementation of SSL/TLS

The Java SSL/TLS package distributed with the J2SE 1.4.2 runtime is a Java implementation of the SSLv3 and TLSv1 protocols. Java-based web services and other systems deployed by the DoD will depend on this implementation to provide confidentiality, integrity, and authentication. Security and performance assessment of this implementation is critical given the proliferation of web services within DoD channels. This research assessed the performance of the J2SE 1.4.2 SSL and TLS implementations, paying particular attention to identifying performance limitations given a very secure configuration. The performance metrics of this research were CPU utilization, network bandwidth, memory, and maximum number of secure socket that could be created given various factors. This research determined an integral performance relationship between the memory heap size and the encryption algorithm used. By changing the default heap size setting of the Java Virtual Machine from 64 MB to 256 MB and using the symmetric encryption algorithm of AES256, a high performance, highly secure SSL configuration is achievable. This configuration can support over 2000 simultaneous secure sockets with various encrypted data sizes. This yields a 200 percent increase in performance over the default configuration, while providing the additional security of 256-bit symmetric key encryption to the application data.