Lightboard Lessons: Perfect Forward Secrecy
Perfect Forward Secrecy allows your encrypted communications to stay secure even if a bad guy were to steal the private key of the websever you were communicating with. But, how is that possible? A...
Published Apr 25, 2017
Version 1.0
Hi swjo...great question! The specs that F5 provides for SSL TPS is for hardware. As an example, the 12250v has specialized hardware for RSA, but not for ECC. You can still use ECC ciphers in version 11.4+ regardless of hardware platform, but the processing of the ECC ciphers is done in software except on our newer platforms that have ECC-specific hardware. Our new i-Series platforms all have specific hardware for ECC (and they still have hardware for RSA as well). The reason that the other platforms don't list the ECC-specific SSL TPS numbers is that ECC is done in software for those specific platforms and the numbers will vary greatly depending on CPU utilization, etc.
As a point of comparison, the i10800 platform is comparable to the 12250v but it has ECC specific hardware, and it is rated at 48K TPS (using ECDSA P-256). More specifically, it used the ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256 cipher string for testing.
I hope this helps.