A security engineer wants to implement forward secrecy but still wants to ensure the number of requests handled by the web server is not drastically reduced due to the larger computational…

DHE provides forward secrecy via ephemeral keys but requires much larger key sizes than ECDHE to achieve equivalent security, resulting in significantly higher CPU overhead during handshakes.

ECDHE (Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral) generates a new ephemeral key pair for each session, ensuring forward secrecy - compromise of the long-term private key does not expose past sessions. Compared to traditional DHE, ECDHE achieves equivalent security strength with much smaller key sizes (e.g., a 256-bit elliptic curve key is comparable to a 3072-bit RSA/DH key), dramatically reducing the computational overhead of the key exchange and allowing the server to handle more TLS handshakes per second.

AES128-SHA is a symmetric cipher suite component used for bulk data encryption after the handshake and does not provide forward secrecy on its own.

Static DH (non-ephemeral) does not provide forward secrecy because the same key pair is reused across sessions, meaning a compromised private key exposes all past session keys.