ausimian
I was curious whether it would be possible to use kernel TLS offload from Elixir. I have a preference for the non-blocking socket programming model over :gen_tcp (probably due to the brain damage I incurred by writing many C-based socket programs over the years) but there’s no equivalent support for TLS out of the box.
Just for fun, I put this little proof-of-concept together, showing how to do it (limited to TLS1.3) My takeaways are:
- It can be done this way
- It probably shouldn’t be done this way (there’s a few ‘naughty’ things it does to reach the end goal)
It would be neat if OTP offered this out of the box (although it would only work on Linux and maybe FreeBSD) and the programming model would still look like :sslI expect but just noop-ing the encryption/decryption in userspace, so it was transparent to the user.
Where Next?
Trending in Discussions
Other Trending Topics
Latest on Elixir Forum
Sponsor Spotlight
Deploy Phoenix to your own VPS with PaaS ease: push-to-deploy, zero downtime, auto SSL, managed Postgres. 14-day free trial at potions.io
Categories:
Sub Categories:
Forums
Popular Tags
- #ecto
- #liveview
- #troubleshooting
- #learning-elixir
- #library
- #deployment
- #erlang
- #testing
- #genserver
- #mix
- #absinthe
- #remote-other
- #otp
- #plug
- #how-to-question
- #macros
- #postgres
- #elixirconf
- #channels
- #exunit
- #discussion
- #code-sync
- #podcasts
- #javascript
- #onsite
- #dialyzer
- #docker
- #authentication
- #umbrella
- #full-time-contract
- #podcasts-by-brainlid
- #ai
- #ecto-query
- #elixirconf-us
- #blog-post
- #elixir-ls
- #phoenix_html
- #iex
- #graphql
- #genstage
- #websockets
- #supervisor
- #advent-of-code
- #distillery
- #processes
- #elixirconf-eu
- #api
- #forms
- #metaprogramming
- #hex
Our Sponsors
Build Elixir applications with speed and confidence.
Supporting innovation across the BEAM ecosystem.
We build reliable cloud platforms for business-critical systems.
Catch errors, track performance, monitor hosts and more.
Elixir, Erlang & BEAM conferences from Code Sync - join us in 2026!
Practical resources that improve the lives of professional developers.
Master modern tools, write cleaner code, and tackle real-world challenges.
Producing high quality Elixir screencasts since 2017.
The team behind Membrane, Popcorn, LiveDebugger. Available for hire.
Courses that'll move you from confusion to "Aha, now I get it!"
Showing Posts 1 to 5- Show Best Posts
- Show All (oldest first)
- Show All (newest first)
Schultzer
Interesting, am I understanding this correctly that the “new” socket is still under TLS but can use the socket API instead of the SSL API.
ausimian
Yeah, precisely.
Schultzer
Have you done some benchmark on this, obviously TLS brings some overhead, but I wonder what the diff is of the SSL vs Socket APIs
ausimian
Absolutely none at all! Performance wasn’t my motivation for this - just wanted to see if it even worked.
Schultzer
Would be interesting to see, also would be even nicer if we could do this straight forward and use socket API, which is easier to work with.