Energy Consumption of TLS, Searchable Encryption and Fully Homomorphic Encryption

TL;DR

This study measures the energy impact of three privacy-enhancing technologies—TLS, Searchable Encryption, and Fully Homomorphic Encryption—highlighting their varying energy costs and the need for sustainable cryptographic solutions.

Contribution

It introduces a reproducible methodology to quantify energy consumption of PETs and compares their environmental impact across different maturity levels and applications.

Findings

TLS increases energy use by 2x

Searchable Encryption increases energy use by 10x

FHE increases energy use by 100,000x

Abstract

Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) have attracted significant attention in response to privacy regulations, driving the development of applications that prioritize user data protection. At the same time, the information and communication technology (ICT) sector faces growing pressure to reduce its environmental footprint, particularly its energy consumption. While numerous studies have assessed the energy consumption of ICT applications, the environmental impact of cryptographic PETs remains largely unexplored. This work investigates this question by measuring the energy consumption increase induced by three PETs compared to their non-private counterparts: TLS, Searchable Encryption, and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). These technologies were chosen for two reasons. First, they cover different maturity levels -- from the widely deployed TLS protocol to the emerging FHE schemes -- allowing us to examine the influence of maturity on energy consumption. Second, they each have well-established applications in industry: web browsing, encrypted databases, and privacy-preserving machine learning. Our results reveal highly variable energy consumption increases, ranging from 2x for TLS to 10x for Searchable Encryption and 100,000x for FHE. Our experiments demonstrate a simple and reproducible methodology, based on existing open-source software, to quantify the energy costs of PETs. They also highlight the wide spectrum of energy demands across technologies, underscoring the importance of further research on sustainable PET design. Finally, we discuss orthogonal research directions, such as hardware acceleration, to outline promising directions toward sustainable PETs.