fast SSL accelerators (Re: Secure peripheral cards)

[Adam Back]

On Fri, Mar 22, 2002 at 03:39:01PM +1100, Greg Rose wrote:
> 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.

While that is true, the issue is the economics; depending on the
figures it may be cheaper and much simpler to buy a faster pentium or
better yet an even faster and better value for money Athlon.  Even buy
a dual processor machine.

Cryptoapps seem to make a 2000 key per second clearly stated as 1024
bit (CRT) RSA for $1400 [1].  That might be harder to compete with
with Athlons as one of those PCI cards is around 13x faster than the
fastest i86 compatible processor you can buy right now.

Of course this is now straying off the original discussion of secure
hardware to and focussing on the fastest most economical way to do
lots of SSL connections per second rather than the most secure way to
store keys in hardware, so I changed the subject line.

Adam

[1] http://www.cryptoapps.com/

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