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The performance comparison to SSL is not really fair, since tcpcrypt does not offer security against passive attackers.

You haven't read the site, have you?

> If, however, a Tcpcrypt connection is successful and any attackers that exist are passive, then Tcpcrypt guarantees privacy.

Good catch. I meant to say that tcpcrypt is vulnerable to active attacks, rather than passive.

The point is that it is not a useful comparison to say that tcpcrypt is 36x faster than SSL, when it offers a weaker level of security.

If you use X.509 server authentication with 2,048-bit RSA keys, tcpcrypt offers about a 25x speed-up over SSL for equivalent security. (Actually slightly better, since tcpcrypt offers forward secrecy while, in the benchmark, SSL does not.) The key optimization is batch signing, where a single RSA signature can authenticate a bunch of connections at once. There are graphs showing this in the paper and talk slides.

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