Optimizing our Encryption Engine

The Evervault Encryption Engine (E3) is a critical internal service responsible for encryption and decryption operations within the Evervault ecosystem, particularly for the Relay and Cages products. A performance issue arose when a new customer, named Acme, began using Response Encryption with Outbound Relay, leading to increased batch job traffic and subsequently triggering synthetic alarms due to latency spikes. In response, Evervault doubled the instances of Outbound Relay and E3 to manage the load, and conducted detailed load testing using a custom Artillery engine to effectively simulate and analyze traffic patterns. The investigation revealed that the latency was influenced by the use of the secp256k1 (k1) elliptic curve, which was less efficient compared to the secp256r1 (r1) curve, prompting a switch that resulted in a fivefold increase in encryption speed. Additional optimizations included increasing the number of vCPUs per instance, switching to compute-optimized Intel instances for better cost-efficiency, implementing dedicated networking threads to maintain service health, and utilizing per-request encryption keys to significantly enhance encryption speed. These changes collectively improved E3's performance, capacity, and cost-efficiency, while also highlighting potential future areas for optimization such as decryption key caching and hardware-optimized configurations.

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