From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 95 20:54:50 PDT
To: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)
Subject: Re: Crypto hardware (was: Using sound cards to accelerate RSA?)
In-Reply-To: <ac90a93404021004b7de@[205.199.118.202]>
Message-ID: <199509290354.XAA21646@frankenstein.piermont.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Timothy C. May writes:
> At 1:49 AM 9/29/95, Douglas Barnes wrote:
> >[Tim May writes about why crypto h/w acceleration using DSPs,
> >and DSPs in general, are likely doomed niche markets.]
> >
> >I pretty much agree with Tim, except it's important to realize
> >that a for a _server_ that is doing a lot of RSA operations, the
> >difference between a 3.2 second encryption and a 1.9 second
> >encryption is significant.
> 
> I don't disagree with Doug about this. But I don't think there are many
> "server" systems running a lot of RSA at this point.
[...]
> for most of us, the
> amount of RSA (or PGP, IDEA, DES, etc.) computation is a tiny fraction of
> the total computons consumed running screen savers.

And if problems like this don't get solved, how do you expect digital
online banking to be done? Psychic quantum transfers between the
machines? What do you think a bank in the future is, if not a server
that has to do lots and lots of RSA or D-H or what have you?

Sorry for being nasty, Tim. Its just that some of us live in the real
world, have real clients, and actually worry about this as a
problem. This *is* a legitimate problem. Consider what the load on a
web site using D-H key exchange for every connection gets like when
you have millions of people hitting it every day.

> (I recall seeing articles about specialized modular exponentiation hardware
> in 1988, and Cylink was offering several such chips. I've yet to see any
> commercial boards, for reasonable prices. And I'm willing to be that no
> more than 3 members of our list would buy such a board, even if the hooks
> were in place to let PGP, RSAREF, etc. use it. Just a hunch.)

You obviously haven't heard of Fortezza cards. Yup, they are key
escrowed -- but they do in fact do public key operations on
board. There are a lot of them floating around.

The reason the market for this is weird is the same reason Sun took
the DES chips off its motherboards years ago -- you can't conduct
modern business with the fucked up export regime we are dealing with.

.pm