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There is a whole lot of available crypto hardware listed here.
I've used a Hifn Crypto Accelerator a year or three ago. Worked with OpenSSL for the most part.

Actually, Stac won a nice big patent infringement suit against MS in '94, but afterwards bailed from the compression biz, and became Hifn in 1998. The core business is still compression and encryption, except now Hifn implements it at the chip level. And their HQ is in Silicon Valley, not Carlsbad, where Stac originated. (IIRC the CTO still lives in Carlsbad, even though Hifn has since shuttered the lab there.)

Karma-burning disclosure: I used to work for Hifn until over a year ago. I know folks over there, so, sorry, can't say much else about my stint.

I tried visiting http://extranet.hifn.com/home/ but I couldn't get the page at all. So if the docs were licensed to allow verbatim non-commercial sharing, this wouldn't be a problem because I could get them from a mirror. It would be as OpenBSD wishes and this thread probably never would have happened.

Putting aside how many questions there are (a minor point), having to answer any personal questions and trusting them with my personal data (something recent headlines warn everyone against; how many companies have recently leaked or lost control of personal data?) is not open access which is what was offered 8 years ago, as de Raadt claims:

"8 years ago all the above data sheets were fully available for download without any registration. Then about 5 years ago hifn closed up completely, and documentation was totally unavailable. About 2 years ago hifn went to this new model of "answer 50 personal questions"."

The change in policy goes either unaddressed by Hifn or is being pitched as "some liberalization of access in recent months" depending on what email you're reading. Framing the issue as liberalization of access in recent months" tries to get people to ignore that well before "recent months" (ending 5 years ago, in fact) these same docs were far more available to people who wanted to help Hifn sell their hardware, people Hifn should be willing to work with. Hifn was doing the right thing for years and recently chose to stop doing the right thing by stopping all distribution of the docs.

Hifn's representative knows that this change in policy doesn't make them look good. They don't dare explain why they can't go back to doing what they were apparently comfortable doing 8 years ago because that would mean acknowledging that their current policy isn't as good as their 8-year-old policy on the same docs. So they try to spin this hoping that you'll take the narrow reading on this and ignore the long-term read. Hence, I think the term lying is appropriate because Hifn's approach misrepresents by trying to get the audience to ignore that now you need to log into a webpage but you used to be able to get the docs no questions asked.

Once one person downloads the docs, they can distribute them.

Once one person downloads the docs, they can distribute them.

I like Theo. The more of his statements I read, the more I appreciate his no compromise, take no prisoners approach.

50 personal questions sounds way beyond overkill. I've downloaded plenty of export controlled software, with merely a few questions.

My guess is, Hifn like many other companies, gives everything to their sales folks, or worse, resells it. Can you blame Theo for taking offense, when they want 50 personal questions answered?

BTW, is this the signup? http://extranet.hifn.com/home/anonymous/?workflow= signupapp or just part of it? That part about the NDA bothers me.....

Seems to me like this would be good hardware to put in a bridgehead router... particularly with software/drivers to opportunistically encrypt IP traffic between routers that support it. I don't know how far away we are from this, but I think this is the goal. Transparent end-to-end opportunistic encryption. Yee ha.

I agree there, now that you mention it; user-transparent encryption certainly can't hurt other than to give some users a possibly false sense of security. And it looks like they are doing something like what you're talking about, at least with respect to DSL modems and related equipment (check out their press releases). It will definitely be cool, I think, if routers that used this sort of technology come into use.

I apologize if this post is redundant.

there are press releases talking about this on the Hi/fn press release page.

how long, do you suppose, before someone makes a keyboard that ssh's (or use some equivalent measure to encrypt all traffic between the keyboard and computer) to the computer, so that the truly paranoid can feel a little less worried about someone planting a KeyGhost on a machine when they're not looking? or is that way too paranoid?