Handshake Times by Cipher using mbedTLS

Posted on 2 mins read

I ran some mbedTLS handshakes with various ciphers to see relative performance on an STM32F746 (Nucleo 144 board) running Stratify OS at 216MHz. These are the results I got.

A Few Notes

  • The hardware uses ethernet and connects to a router.
  • The test connected to Google’s Firebase (real-time database) and updated one value which consisted of a couple hundred bytes of data.
  • I only tested ciphers that I thought would work. Firebase doesn’t support every possible cipher so in many cases the handshake failed.
  • The tests were run with debugging on. So the values don’t represent optimal times but they can be compared for relative performance.

The Results

    {
    "type": "bar",
        "data": {
            "labels": ["RSA/AES128CBC/SHA", 
                "RSA/AES256CBC/SHA", 
                "RSA/AES128CBC/SHA256", 
                "RSA/AES256CBC/SHA256",
                "RSA/AES128GCM/SHA256",
                "RSA/AES256GCM/SHA384",
                "EDCHE/RSA/AES128CBC/SHA", 
                "EDCHE/RSA/AES256CBC/SHA", 
                "EDCHE/RSA/AES128CBC/SHA256", 
                "EDCHE/RSA/AES256CBC/SHA256",
                "EDCHE/RSA/AES128GCM/SHA256",
                "EDCHE/RSA/AES256GCM/SHA384"
                ],
            "datasets": [
            {
                "label": "Handshake in milliseconds",
                "data": [
                    1251,
                    1217,
                    1328,
                    1226,
                    1249,
                    1334,
                    4921,
                    4986,
                    4891,
                    4856,
                    5006,
                    4974
                ]
            }

            ]
        },
        "options": {
            "legend": {
                "show": "false"
            },
            "scales": {
                "xAxes" : [{
                    "ticks": {
                        "autoSkip": false
                    }
                }]

            }
        }
    }
Cipher Execution Time
MBEDTLS_TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA 1251ms
MBEDTLS_TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA 1217ms
MBEDTLS_TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256 1328ms
MBEDTLS_TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA256 1226ms
MBEDTLS_TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 1249ms
MBEDTLS_TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 1334ms
MBEDTLS_TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA 4921ms
MBEDTLS_TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA 4986ms
MBEDTLS_TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256 4891ms
MBEDTLS_TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA384 4856ms
MBEDTLS_TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 5006ms
MBEDTLS_TLS_ECDHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 4974ms

With debugging mostly disabled MBEDTLS_TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 improved to 761ms from 1249ms.

You can see a clear pattern in the results. RSA only was much faster than ECDHE_RSA. ECDHE_RSA uses two ciphers–one for the server certificate and one for the key exchange–while RSA just uses one. Because the data exchange was so small, the performance differences for the AES portion doesn’t really show up in the results.

The following ciphers failed (meaning incompatibility with Firebase).

  • MBEDTLS_TLS_RSA_WITH_NULL_MD5
  • MBEDTLS_TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
  • MBEDTLS_TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_256_CBC_SHA
  • MBEDTLS_TLS_RSA_WITH_NULL_SHA256
  • MBEDTLS_TLS_RSA_WITH_CAMELLIA_128_CBC_SHA
  • MBEDTLS_TLS_PSK_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
  • MBEDTLS_TLS_DHE_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
  • MBEDTLS_TLS_PSK_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
  • MBEDTLS_TLS_RSA_PSK_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
  • MBEDTLS_TLS_ECDH_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
  • MBEDTLS_TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
  • MBEDTLS_TLS_ECDH_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA
  • MBEDTLS_TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256
  • MBEDTLS_TLS_ECDH_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA256
  • MBEDTLS_TLS_ECDHE_ECDSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
  • MBEDTLS_TLS_ECDH_RSA_WITH_AES_128_GCM_SHA256
  • MBEDTLS_TLS_ECDHE_PSK_WITH_RC4_128_SHA
  • MBEDTLS_TLS_RSA_WITH_ARIA_128_CBC_SHA256
  • MBEDTLS_TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CCM