Secure peripheral cards

[R. A. Hettinga]

--- begin forwarded text


Status:  U
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2002 09:00:58 +0000
From: Nicko van Someren <nicko at ncipher.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:0.9.4)
Gecko/20011126 Netscape6/6.2.1
To: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
CC: Digital Bearer Settlement List <dbs at philodox.com>,
	dcsb at ai.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Secure peripheral cards

R. A. Hettinga 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.

...
 > [1] http://www.ncipher.com/products/rscs/datasheets/nFast.pdf

While you are right that we focus these days on the key management
side I would like to say that now, as ever, the speeds we quote are
for 1024 bit RSA decryptions, not 512 bit.  Incedentally the data
sheet that you reference clearly states that the nFast800 handles
"Up to 800 RSA SSL handshakes per second (1024-bit RSA decryptions)".

	Nicko

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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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