[10606] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Secure peripheral cards
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Rose)
Thu Mar 21 23:48:11 2002
Message-Id: <4.3.1.2.20020322153701.03b3fee0@127.0.0.1>
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2002 15:39:01 +1100
To: Adam Back <adam@cypherspace.org>
From: Greg Rose <ggr@qualcomm.com>
Cc: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>,
Roop Mukherjee <bmukherj@shoshin.uwaterloo.ca>,
cryptography@wasabisystems.com
In-Reply-To: <20020322000615.A1403614@exeter.ac.uk>
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At 12:06 AM 3/22/2002 +0000, Adam Back wrote:
>I'm not sure NCipher gear is the #1 for acceleration, I think they're
>probably more focussed and used for secure key management. For
>example they quote [1] an nForce can do up to 400 new SSL connections
>per second. So that's CRT RSA, not sure if 1024 bit or 512 bit (it
>does say "up to"). openSSL on a PIII-633Mhz can do 265 512 bit CRT
>RSA per second, or 50 1024 bit CRT RSA per second. So wether it will
>even speed up current entry-level systems depends on the correct
>interpretation of the product sheet.
But don't forget that your pentium can't do anything *else* while it's
doing those RSAs... whereas the machine with the nForce can be actually
servicing the requests.
Greg.
>And the economics of course depends on how expensive they are relative
>to general purpose CPUs, plus the added complexity of using embedded
>hardware and drivers and getting to play with your web server.
>General purpose CPUs are _really_ fast and cheap right now.
>
>But for the application at hand -- secure key-management, perhaps an
>NCipher card is ok -- I haven't compared feature sets so can't really
>comment.
>
>Adam
>
>[1] http://www.ncipher.com/products/rscs/datasheets/nFast.pdf
>
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Greg Rose INTERNET: ggr@qualcomm.com
Qualcomm Australia VOICE: +61-2-9817 4188 FAX: +61-2-9817 5199
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