NETWORK STACK OPTIMIZATION FOR IMPROVED IPSEC PERFORMANCE ON LINUX

Virtual Private Network (VPN) connectivity is a necessity in the public Internet, for accessing in a secure fashion private resources from anywhere. Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) is a standardized VPN technology for serving multiple connectivity scenarios. Implementation of cryptography is widely considered as a performance bottleneck and a target for optimization. We present a set of system configuration optimizations for the Linux 2.6 kernel network stack implementation, supported by extensive measurements. These optimizations achieve significant throughput gains. Our work demonstrates that comparable performance between plain IP and IPsec connections is possible without altering the implementation of the cryptographic algorithms.