The importance of security is often realized only after an application’s security is breached. One of the reasons why security is not enforced is it’s impact on application performance. Adding security makes my application slow is a very common excuse for not securing applications. While security features is a generic term, and can mean a number of things right from firewalls to identity management and more, in this article we will concentrate on the cryptographic implications. We will study the impact of using various kinds of cryptographic algorithms on performance.

The question of how best to perform user authentication is a puzzle that is quite tough to solve. While newer techniques keep emerging, the bread-and-butter user authentication technology of passwords will not go away very soon. Usage of passwords for authenticating users raises several concerns, such as how long the passwords should be, using what combinations of letters, digits, special symbols, etc; and also how long should passwords remain valid (i.e. how frequently they should expire), and so on.