Netflix explores more efficient ways to encrypt users' streams
Over the last year, Netflix has been transitioning from HTTP to HTTPS for its customers' streams. The process hasn't been simple. The company indicates that the computational costs to its serving platform from this move have been significant. To reduce the operational costs of encrypting all streams, Netflix has exploring new ways of optimizing Transport Layer Security (TLS) bulk encryption. In a recent paper, Netflix's engineers explain what they've been able to accomplish.
First, the engineers considered different options for Netflix's cipher. They opted for the AES-GCM cipher over the more common Cipher Block Chaining, deciding that GCM provided adequate protection while requiring less processsing and computation. Second, Netflix considered a number of ...