Simplified SSL/TLS Acceleration

85% of all network traffic is encrypted with SSL/TLS protocols, improving security, but causing greater latency.

The Department of Defense operates some of the most dynamic and dispersed network environments in the world, all faced with a herculean task of meeting the ever-growing demands of mission critical users.

These demands placed on DoD networks from the explosive growth in Cloud and SaaS adoption, coupled with a massive increase in remote work, has not only made DoD networks more distributed and complex, but often outpaced available capacity. The result is often crippling latency, reduced application performance and poor end-user experiences.

To compound these issues, nearly 85% of DoD’s network traffic is encrypted using SSL/TLS protocols, presenting unique challenges to unlock greater capacity. In the past, to optimize and accelerate encrypted traffic and applications involved lengthy security conversations, logistical hurdles, sharing or copying hundreds of certificates and keys, perceived network security risks, and in the end, was often deemed too risky and difficult a process for agencies, until now.

As encrypted traffic started overtaking public sector networks, Riverbed began reengineering its optimization and acceleration solutions to meet the new norm of SSL/TLS encryption. Riverbed’s enhanced SteelHead WAN Optimization and Client Accelerator solutions simplify the authentication process of SSL/TLS traffic.

Riverbed’s solutions now function like a Hardware Security Module (HSM) by granting access to the “session” key, which is unique and randomly generated, for each encrypted communication session.

This novel approach to authentication bypasses the traditional SSL/TLS “handshake” that requires public and private keys and certificates and instead allows encrypted network communications between authorized users and applications within the SteelHead optimization fabric. No sensitive keys or credentials are ever exchanged or exposed. Once an SSL/TLS session is authenticated and an encrypted connection is established, DoD agencies can easily unlock network capacity and improve application performance to meet the ever-growing demands of global users.

Riverbed’s SSL/TLS Acceleration Solutions Helps Customers:

• Achieve zero-touch SSL/TLS optimization and acceleration
• Unlock critical capacity across any DoD network environment
• Maintain and strengthen network security postures
• Boost the performance of any on-prem or SaaS SSL/TLS applications by up to 10x
• Reduce bandwidth requirements by up to 99%
• Realize true value of IT investments
• Transparently operate with mutual authentication (CAC) and advanced TLS (ECDH, PFS)
• Eliminate certificate management