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Hardware Crypto Support In OpenBSD
"Further work will now happen. We wish to support other products (ie. IRE, Bluesteelnet, perhaps even 3COM or PCC-ISES if they would open their minds). Some crypto chip vendors are being extremely friendly to us. If anyone wants to help write drivers, get in touch."
We also hope to add more parts to our cryptography framework so that it can supply RSA/DSA type operations for chips that support that, so that OpenSSL can use the framework, and thus enhancing everything from https to ssh performance. We have grand schemes in mind."
"If you order a card from www.powercrypt.com, tell them you intend to use it with OpenBSD. I have heard rumours they are allowed to export it."
"Most of this work was done by Jason Wright and Angelos Keromytis."
FPGA is cool, but it's really slow. We prototyped one of our old chips in it back when, and decided we didn't enjoy it (plus, almost no existing FPGA will hold a compression engine).
A better solution is to slap a MIPS processor, one of Hi/fn's newer chips (with a MIPS bus and protected mode, the 7811 will do for now, especially with its six DMA channels), and some memory on a PCI board. Write some code for the MIPS, and you've got yourself a packet processor which can be made FIPS-secure, possibly up to level 3. See the data sheet for the 7811 for more info on this kind of thing.
-Billy
3DES is not known to have exploitable weaknesses. If you have a choice between 3DES and anything else, the current choice is 3DES.
The problem is that nothing else is as well-explored; all of the "NSA-safe" algorithms are too new to have been properly dug through.
I personally like RC4 more than DES-type algorithms, but it's even less understood. Twofish is an impressive algorithm as well, but again, its review process has only started. When (if) it becomes AES, then it'll have enough attacks to make it worth considering.
-Billy
The sad part is, even in meta-moderation these mismoderated points won't be corrected. If they hate BSD while moderating, why would their friends who are meta-moderating be any different
Because metamoderation involves random selection rather than self-selection. Only people "interested" in BSD (or Hi/fn, or HW encryption) will be attracted to this story, and unfortunately there are simply more people negatively than positively interested right now. Hopefully, the random selection involved in metamoderation will result in a more "disinterested" (i.e. impartial) group of people.
-Billy
This particular chip (Hi/fn 7751) was designed and tested to accelerate SSL, so I suspect it won't have a problem there. I've put a couple of million SSL packets through it (give or take a million, who's counting).
-Billy
Grin. I think that's part of it, yes.
:-)
Actually, it's not too suprising that they have an influence on the RFCs; they're very relaxed about their patents, and tend to be willing to politely compete with people who are violating them (or, more often, fairly license to people who were starting to infringe). The only time I've seen them get nasty is when the competitor starts making threats, as happened with Microsoft. (It was good to see MS get a comeuppance there.
For those who don't know, BTW, Hi/fn is the core of the company formerly known as STAC; we split off from STAC a couple of years ago.
-Billy
Well, Hi/fn helped design Twofish (Doug Whiting is our CTO), one of the leading AES candidates, so although our current chips won't run AES :), there's no room for doubt that our future chips will be able to.
The chip they're using also accelerates DES, RC4, SHA-1, MD5, LZS, and MPPC. I wonder whether their driver handles all of that?
-Billy
P.S.: I'm not connected to any department at Hi/fn which would know these things for sure; I'm only using publicly available information, so your guess is as good as mine.
This would give the BSD's more ground on large
e-commerce websites, since hardware crypto is usually used when you need to reduce the load
on a loaded ssl server. I say the BSD's because this is likely to be ported over to the rest too
Cool...
FreeBSD.... The Daemon Made me do it
Further work will now happen. We wish to support other products (ie. IRE, Bluesteelnet, perhaps even 3COM or PCC-ISES if they would open their minds). Some crypto chip vendors are being extremely friendly to us. If anyone wants to help write drivers, get in touch.
In case anyone cares, specs for the VLSI (Philips) VSC115 are published. Pretty nice performance specs. The official policy is to support Linux driver development for new products, but the details are still in the works and BSD is (alas) not a priority.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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?
-------------------- the list is long. dirac angestung gesept
Hmm. Well, the problem is that a network link is rather connection-oriented; it only encrypts stuff going from your machine to another specific one.
:).
If you try to visit any other sites, as when web browsing, you're not using the secured link any more, so you have to negotiate a new one.
The main use for this type of technology is VPNs: two seperate buildings full of computers which want to be on the same network, but which want to use the internet (cheap) rather than a leased line (expensive). In that case, we simply plug one of these 7751 boards into the routers in each building, and tell the routers to encrypt when talking to each other. None of the users need know that they're being protected
-Billy