The technology, dubbed SSLShading, shows how SSL proxies based on commodity hardware can protect Web servers without slowing down transactions, according to a presentation scheduled at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Design and Implementation in Boston March 30 through April 1.

SSL/TLS -- the cryptographic protocols used to protect online Web transactions -- encrypts traffic from visitors' machines all the way to Web servers. That makes it impossible to pick up data such as session cookies by preying on unencrypted networks, which is .

Based on an algorithm devised by researchers in Korea and the U.S., SSLShading is software that directs SSL traffic being proxied either to a CPU or a graphics processing unit (GPU), whichever is most appropriate to handle the current load. The researchers will discuss the algorithm in their paper ": Cheap SSL Acceleration with Commodity Processors."

FOR MORE ON ALGORITHMS:

"The key idea is to send all requests to CPU when the number of pending cryptographic operations is small enough to be handled by CPU," the research team says in an earlier paper. "If requests begin to pile up in the queue, then the algorithm offloads cryptographic operations to GPUs and benefits from parallel execution for high throughput."