Arunkumar Venkatramani, Muralidhar Narasimhan, Ramadass Nagarajan
In this paper, we quantitatively analyze the costs
and feasibility of universal encryption, considering various
performance metrics that may be relevant in a personal environment.
We try to validate the hypothesis, ``All network communication can
be encrypted strongly at negligible costs''. To this end, we evaluate
software encryption performance with respect to maximum throughput
sustainable, power consumption and latency, on a reasonable set of
devices that form a personal environment. We also analyze a few
application classes to find the overhead due to encryption. Our
results show that software encryption adds an order of magnitude of
overhead with respect to power consumption compared to network
transmission. We show that latency overheads are acceptable for most
devices and networks. We also show, that for typical applications
like audio and video, the overheads are negligible; encryption can
comfortably match network data rates and latencies are 
. It
is however, premature to pronounce a decisive result on the
feasibility of universal encryption, but our study points towards an
optimistic scenario, where for typical applications ``encrypting
everything'' does not add any significant costs.