The hypothesis that governed the motivation for this study is:
``All network communication can be encrypted strongly at negligible costs in the near future''.
In order to test this hypothesis, we first identified the factors affecting the use of encryption in a personal environment. Having identified the factors, we analyzed the costs of universal encryption with respect to these factors. This analysis provided us with some approximate limits to the feasibility of universal encryption. We also analyzed the costs of application-based encryption, wherein we considered 3 classes of applications and analyzed specific applications in these classes for feasibility and overheads involved. This latter study was primarily focussed on helping application developers to make choices on the use of encryption in their distributed applications.