Introduction

In this project, we propose to quantitatively test the validity of the hypothesis, ``All network communication can be encrypted and authenticated strongly at negligible costs in the near future''. We first propose to identify the primary factors that affect the use of encryption in an application and then come up with a framework to quantitatively assess the effect of these factors with respect to various performance metrics such as encryption speed sustainable and power consumption. The framework will construct a quantitative case to support or reject the hypothesis and characterize precisely a class of applications and/or environment where the hypothesis holds or fails. We propose to study this for a personal environment which is characterized by numerous machines, many of which are portable devices with widely varying capabilities and constraints.