Here is their excuse:

> Panasonic told us that enabling encryption could incur a 20–30% capacity loss. In addition, when using IPsec, ESP and IP headers can introduce 20–30 bytes of overhead, which is nontrivial for small-packet applications like VoIP and video calls

> Panasonic told us that enabling encryption could incur a 20–30% capacity loss.

Wow, I guess they're still betting on customers sending tons of redundant data up/down that they can shave off via compression? That's such a 90s modem thing to do. ("Faster than 56 kbit/s!!")

It is almost free on modern CPUs that have hardware acceleration, yea

Space-faring electronics aren't exactly cost-sensitive - the cost of a cluster of crypto-accelerated CPUs or rad-hardened FPGAs is peanuts compared to the human and launch costs that go into these satellites.

Issue is the satellite was launched 10 years ago with 20-year-old tech. So, calculations of today may not be applicable on them.

Wireguard uses ChaCha20, which to my knowledge neither has nor requires HW acceleration to be fast.

> However, the software performance [of wireguard] is far below the speed of wire.

https://github.com/chili-chips-ba/wireguard-fpga

It's faster on CPUs without dedicated hardware than AES, but that doesn't mean that it's faster than fixed-function AES hardware.