Concluding Remarks

  In this paper, we investigated the costs of network security protocols. We used a variety of benchmarks to determine how IPsec performs under a wide range of scenarios. Our experiments (and in particular our macrobenchmarks) have shown that IPsec outperforms all other popular schemes that try to accomplish secure network communications. Even though this safety comes at a price, which is present no matter which protocol one uses, it is possible to get enough performance for practical use by using dedicated cryptographic hardware. This price may easily be acceptable for many applications and environments, given the remarkable flexibility and transparency offered by IPsec.