Researchers from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, Polytechnic University di Torino in Italy, and the research and development arm of Spain’s Telefónica Group have published a paper investigating the impacts of HTTPS use for industry and web users.
The paper, The Cost of the “S” in HTTPS PDF, was presented at ACM CoNEXT in Sydney, and suggests that while the use of HTTPS is increasing due to mounting security concerns, it could result in more latency online, greater battery drain for some connected devices, and the loss of in-network value-added services.
The paper asserts that HTTPS “does not come for free”, with the researchers saying that HTTPS “may introduce overhead in terms of infrastructure costs, communication latency, data usage, and energy consumption”.
The encryption offered by an HTTPS address may protect information from “man-in-the-middle” attacks, but that same functionality can hamper the application of “middlebox” network appliances, such as firewalls.