Minor Description
In network/common, SASL with DIGESTÂ-MD5 authentication is used for negotiating a secure communication channel. When SASL operation mode is "authÂ-conf", the data transferred on the network is encrypted. DIGEST-MD5 mechanism supports following encryption: 3DES, DES, and RC4. The negotiation procedure will select one of them to encrypt / decrypt the data on the channel.
However, 3des and rc4 are slow relatively. We could add code in the negotiation to make it support AES for more secure and performance.
The proposed solution is:
When "auth-conf" is enabled, at the end of original negotiation, the authentication succeeds and a secure channel is built. We could add one more negotiation step: Client and server negotiate whether they both support AES. If yes, the Key and IV used by AES will be generated by server and sent to client through the already secure channel. Then update the encryption / decryption handler to AES at both client and server side. Following data transfer will use AES instead of original encryption algorithm.
