Universal SSL: How It Scales

On Monday, we announced Universal SSL, enabling HTTPS for all websites using CloudFlare’s Free plan. Universal SSL represents a massive increase in the number of sites we serve over HTTPS—from tens of thousands, to millions. People have asked us, both in comments and in person, how our servers handle this extra load. The answer, in a nutshell, is this: we found that with the right hardware, softwa

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" we prioritize AES-based ciphers, and prefer AES-GCM to AES-CBC. / Smaller keys allow elliptic curve cryptography to be around 5-10x faster than RSA in general cases. For Universal SSL, we chose the elliptic curve P-256 "