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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:10:56
Bill Stewart (bill.stewart@pobox.com)
Thu, 06 Aug 1998 20:37:14 -0700
At 01:22 PM 8/5/98 +0100, Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
>With the speed of ordinary processors today I also don't see any
>necessity or big advantage of using hardware crypto rather than
>software, if one limits consideration to that part of the
>communication that really needs security protection.
For mass-market equipment, like cell phones, it's cheaper
to integrate as many functions as possible on a chip.
This can mean RC4 or other designed-for-general-purpose-CPUs
algorithms rather than hardware-oriented bit-benders,
but it's still stuff on a pre-packaged chip made by somebody else,
and the closest you'll find to user-programmable hardware
is a chip with the CPU in flash memory - cell phone designers
don't like socketed EPROMs because they take up space
and can shake out of their sockets, and even flash costs too much.
Non-general-purpose hardware can also be useful for high performance
applications; a server that does lots of public-key transactions
can really benefit from an accelerator card, though it's
reasonable to have the card be a fast bignum multiplier
rather than full-scale crypto, since it's more flexible.
3DES is slow enough that you really need hardware for that T3 encryptor,
and it helps to have it even for a T1, though Pentium followons
are doing a better job than they used to. Other algorithms,
like RC4/RC5/RC6 are much faster, but getting your stockbroker firm
to accept them may be a long slow process.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Sat Apr 10 1999 - 01:10:56