[openssl-users] Question about TLS record length limitations

[Software Engineer 979]

Hello,

I'm currently developing an data transfer application using OpenSSL. The
application is required to securely transfer large amounts of data over a
low latency/high bandwidth network. The data being transferred lives in a
3rd part application that uses 1 MB buffer to transfer data to my
application. When I hook OpenSSL into my application I notice an
appreciable decline in network throughput. I've traced the issue the
default TLS record size of 16K. The smaller record size causes the 3rd
party application's buffer to be segmented into 4 16K buffers per write and
the resulting overhead considerably slows things down. I've since modified
the version of OpenSSL that I'm using to support an arbitrary TLS record
size allowing OpenSSL to scale up to 1MB or larger TLS record size. Since
this change, my network throughput has dramatically increased (187%
degradation down to 33%).

I subsequently checked the TLS RFC to determine why a 16K record size was
being used, and all could find was the following:

length
      The length (in bytes) of the following TLSCompressed.fragment.

      The length MUST NOT exceed 2^14 + 1024.

The language here is pretty explicit stating that the length must not
exceed 16K (+ some change).Does anyone know the reason for this? Is there a
cryptographic reason why we shouldn't exceed this message size? Based on my
limited experiment, it would appear that a larger record size would benefit
low latency/high bandwidth networks.

Thanks!
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