Re: Crypto hardware (was: Using sound cards to accelerate RSA?)

[Simon Spero <ses@tipper.oit.unc.edu>]

On Thu, 28 Sep 1995, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> 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.

This is the problem I was concerned about (actually RSA rather than D-H). 
In HTTP-NG, in addition to supporting PK for key exchanges and 
authentications, there is now support that allows most values used in the 
protocol to be signed. Now that non repudiability is becoming legally 
significant, there are all sort of things that either party might want to 
have signed, for example negotiation options (e.g. wont-log-transactions) 
and meta-information (e.g. kidcode: NC-17,barney-boffing).

More clients and more signings means that conventional chips arent't 
going to be economical for this.

[stuff on hardware]
> 
> 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.

That's another question. A DSP chip can also be used for crypto - yet 
sound cards and nexts aren't ITARed, and aren't really considered 
dual-use. A Modular exponentiator isn't a crypto device  (hey - 
it's a bignum accelerator for Mathematica). Now, if I had a pipelined 
WSI chip capable of delivering one result per cycle, I could think of 
some useful applications, but ...

Simon