throwing additional minimal hardware at the https-slow-on-picow problem

[ams1]

Hi @ide ,

GREAT initiative, GREAT write-up - I adhere 100%. THANK YOU for pushing this!

Have you considered adding a cryptographic coprocessor to the pico W to offload these TLS operations?

I'm NOT sure if/how this would work, but I'm currently looking into this, and found something maybe similar.
espressif/esp-idf#8286

I would love to do fast HTTPS on the PICO W without buying/soldering additional things, but yeah... it doesn't seem to work.

Also I'm open to other directions to solve this problem with the pico-W.

[ide]

I haven't pursued this HTTPS server other than opening adafruit/circuitpython#7657 on the CircuitPython repo. Using a regular Pi running Linux is a more practical way to run an HTTPS server for my use case (personal project, no size constraints, plugged into a wall socket) and I've shared this repo with others who might be more motivated to get HTTPS working on the Pico.

Using hardware-based encryption could be fast enough. This link benchmarked ciphers like various AES modes in software and hardware on a different Cortex-M0+ processor and found a 10-20x speed-up.

[ams1]

IMO you've done a TON - I really appreciate it!

True, for us techies, a regular Pi is almost ubiquitous, but when "deploying" a web-app at non-techie locations... it helps having a ~$10 option 😄.

I'll let you know if I make progress on this - or you can of course close this issue.

[bablokb]

You might want to take a look at https://github.com/bablokb/circuitpython-esp32at. This is an api-compatible implementation of a wifi co-processor using ESP32-AT. It not only offloads TLS, but the complete wifi-stack. I have found it on-par with the Pico-W in many respects (but this is more due to the poor performance of the Pico-W).

I never tested an encrypted SSL-server though, but it should be possible. This would need a custom AT-firmware with your own certificates, but building custom AT-firmwares is simple and well documented.