Security and privacy are growing concerns in the Internet community due
to the Internet's rapid growth and the desire to conduct business over
it safely.  This desire has led to the advent of several proposals for
security standards, such as secure IP, secure HTTP, and the Secure
Socket Layer.  All of these standards propose using cryptographic
protocols such as DES and RSA.  Thus, the need to use encryption
protocols is increasing.

Shared-memory multiprocessors make attractive server platforms, for
example as secure World-Wide Web servers.  These machines are becoming
more common, as shown by recent vendor introductions of platforms such
as SGI's Challenge, Sun's SPARCCenter, and DEC's AlphaServer.  The
spread of these machines is due both to their relative ease of
programming and their good price/performance.

This paper is an experimental performance study that examines how
encryption protocol performance can be improved by using parallelism.
We show linear speedup for several different Internet-based
cryptographic protocol stacks running on a symmetric shared-memory
multiprocessor using two different approaches to parallelism.