In an emulation testbed with 200 ms effective client-server RTT, Cirripede added no more than a few seconds to time-to-first-byte, attributable primarily to two extra TLS round-trips and the SOCKS request-response. For large file downloads, Cirripede's TCP connection splitting (two lower-RTT hops instead of one high-RTT hop) produced faster total transfer times than the non-Cirripede baseline, confirmed with a control non-Cirripede SOCKS proxy.
From 2011-houmansadr-cirripede — Cirripede: Circumvention Infrastructure using Router Redirection with Plausible Deniability
· §6.2, Figure 3
· 2011
· Computer and Communications Security
Implications
ISP-deployed connection-splitting proxies impose sub-second latency overhead in practice; connection-splitting is a net throughput win on high-RTT intercontinental paths and should be exploited in protocol design.
Benchmark Cirripede-style designs against split-TCP baselines, not end-to-end baselines, to isolate proxy overhead from RTT reduction gains.