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OpenSSL Gets Cryptography Gift From Sun
Kataire writes "C|Net posted this story about how Sun Microsystems' has donated 'elliptic curve' encryption technology, (developed by Whitfield Diffie of Diffie-Hellman public key fame) to the OpenSSL project. This potentially means better encryption for lighter-weight systems such as PDAs."
Now I can keep my pesky roommates out of my palms oh-so-full social calendar.
Karma: Not Particularly Funny.
And the chances of that happenning is ....
This isn't the encryption scheme mentioned previously, when Slashdot reported that a distributed project has almost "broken" the scheme, is it?
Pax Digitalia
Yay encryption rulez! go SUN
Is this only for PDA's running xBSD?
Sun is basically "arming the rebels" so they can better fight Microsoft. Even though they may have other motives, it's nice of them anyway.
cryptix.org has ECC for a while now as free code.
I hate you bastards..get my curiosity flowing, now I get the waste the rest of the work day reading this I encrypted something on my pda once..then tossed it out. Rather unorthidox method of the onetime pad cypher, I know, but hey.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Although I use and keep up with the BSD side of things, but I think this affects the entire open source community as a whole, including xBSD, Linux, Apache+SSL, and gobs of other software that utilizes SSL for security.
Nonetheless, it is great to see Sun contributing back to the community.
This does bring up one question in my mind though... could this be used in SSL acceleration cards to improve the effiency of the SSL 'processor' (i.e.: keep the same performance level while reducing the amount of power necessary)?
Whatever happened to the stockwatch troll? Did VA [whateverthefuckitisthismonth] finally get delisted?!!
newlmsy akhtswnd whss adna nwsufaclanw!
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Another fine donation by Sun. Congratulations to them for the offering.
Since there is no known weakening from quantum computers of elyptic curve cryptosystems EC's may well be better for long term cryptography, even on supercomputers. Since it is pretty well known that the massive parallelism of quantom computers will greatly increase the ability of future systems to factor large numbers more traditional cyphers will be under more pressure.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
what about the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture? If openSSL would include that with elliptic curves we could solve Fermat's last theorem on our PDA's...
so now do we hate sun or love sun ?
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Nonetheless, it is great to see Sun contributing back to the community.
Now let's see if we can get the to contibute Solaris to the community.
Has anybody noticed a trend lately of large corporations or companies making offers to the public source movements. Is this a play between them for notice, or are they finally starting to figure out that it's better to play nice with open source than fight against it?
When I first got my Visor, a co-worker sent me an app he had been using to encrypt passwords and such. It was called Certicom SecureMemo. To set it up, you would drag your stylus in circles (elliptic curves), and it would generate a key based on this. Now, my question is, doesn't this imply that this technology is already implemented on Palm? Given, it's not OSS, but it is there.
Unfortunately, I think Certicom pulled the app from their site. Nice app.
... that and an unrestricted version of Solaris 9 for x86 (unrestricted meaning that it can be purchased/downloaded and used on non-Sun hardware) that supports more more hardware than what Solaris 8 supports.
OpenSSL is written by the OpenBSD people.
Therefore, the correct section is BSD.
.. and that they have given a irreversible distribution right for free software, so that its usable on free software but not for proprietary software unlicensed by SUN.
Or... was that a rather evil thought? I'm not sure anymore, I'm so blinded by my zealotism.
could this be used in SSL acceleration cards to improve the effiency of the SSL 'processor'
Unlikely in presently deployed accelerator cards, since AFAIK most (Rainbow CryptoSwift and nCipher) are based on custom hardware chips (FPGA and the likes) which do mainly RSA key setup which is the really slow part of establishing a SSL session. I believe several of the cards do not even do any symmetric (i.e. RC4, 3DES) acceleration because it isn't worth it.
Doesn't most hand-helds have more than enough processing power for encryption? Since you don't have broadband connections, the highest possible pressure on the processor is to encrypt/decrypt 56 kbit/s. With f.ex. 233 MHz, that's around 30 MHz pr. kbyte. And if you're encrypting financial transactions the amount of data transfered is very, very small.
The article cites that current encryption technology is based on 17th and 18th century mathematics - so is quite a lot of other things that work very well indeed. Mathematics don't deteriorate.
Of course this is a Good Thing (tm), but I honestly don't think that many people will ever notice a difference.
But if they would release it under an open source license, the best of Solaris could be mixed with the best of Linux. Not to mention one of the real unixes as open source would be neat.
I read the article, but "technology" was the only thing I read was "donated". WTF does that mean? Did they give them reference code with a GPL (or whetever the OpenSSL library uses)? Did they give up patent rights to the method? The article didn't explain just what the OpenSSL folks got.
Method of processing duck feet
Supposedly, this offers encryption with less computational demand. And, supposedly, it's not going to be in use for 5 to 10 years.
If that's the case, my quesion is this: Why bother? Moore's law says that in the 10 years that it will take to get this implemented, CPU's will be *64 times faster* than they are today.
Just think: "Wow! With this new encryption technology, encrypted 100 megabit networking only takes 0.05% of my processer instead of 0.1%!"
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I know that OpenSSH is maintained and developed primarily by OpenBSD developers, but I thought that OpenSSL was separate from OpenBSD.
The article reads as if using ECC for small devices is a novel concept. That isn't the case- Certicom is 15 years old, and has done ECC for handheld and embedded devices for at least 4-5 years. It has some solid encryption researchers (Scott Vanstone, for example) and a bundle of patents. Most Palms out today use Certicom's ECC, although newer versions are using RSA. And while Certicom is probably the best known company promoting ECC, I know of several other companies in Japan, Korea and Germany that sell their own implementations of ECC.
...given that it was invented by NeXT?
OpenSSL is not the child of OpenBSD, nor a cousin of OpenSSH. OpenSSL is an independant project.
OpenSSH is a baby of openBSD, and OpenSSH depends on OpenSSL.
The Eliptic curve stuff was donated to OpenSSH team, not the OpenSSL group. So dreaming about this in your ssl accelerated card of the future is a bit silly. However, if openSSH team open sources the tech, and that tech is under bsd lisence, then maybe it will work its way down into the chip makers crypto designes.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
We are techs/geeks, thats what we do. We don't politicize or make war! We do what we are best at.
Free speech is getting expensive...
I can see this as a positive step to secure the network end to end, from the server room down to the smallest of devices, the PDA.
As it stands now, having a wireless network could be a blessing. Information available at your finger tips. PDAs have never been a strong focal point for security in my experience. It will be great to see a network that can be truly encrypted end to end.
Now if only the user friendliness of this made it so that even the ordinary citizen could use it.
You know what that tells us, right?
:)
The NSA can already crack it.
OpenSSL is written by the OpenBSD people
Not quite.
OpenSSL is maintained by OpenSSL core members: Ralf S. Engelschall, Ben Laurie, Mark J. Cox, Dr. Stephen Henson, and others developers.
OpenSSH was written by OpenBSD members (Theo de Raadt, Niels Provos, Markus Friedl, Dug Song, and others). OpenSSH uses OpenSSL as a cryptographic library source (it is highly optimized for many processors).
So how in the hell is this a BSD-specific article!?!?!
...they should have donated some decent web servers to them so I can access the OpenSSL site more than once a week.
...given that it was invented by NeXT?
Sorry, Ellipitic curve cryptography was invented independantly by Neal Koblitz, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington and Victor Miller who was then at IBM.
(Source)
If they are so *&*^ serious about security? The slapper worm has been out for quite a while now, and Sun's cobalts run a REALLY old version of OpenSSL. Sun's last patch was released almost a month ago, for a CGI vulnerability. They've been asked dozens of times about the OpenSSL patch, and won't even give customers the courtesy of a "We're going to have one by X" response. CobaltOS is just a flippin' rebuilt RedHat OS; it isn't hard to patch!
BSD? Huh?
Like bite on really stupid trolls?
Blockquoth the News.com article
I know the keys used for ECC are generally smaller, but that seems like a fairly minor consideration even for PDAs (how many keys do you ever need to store anyway?)
Is eliptic curve cryptography actually faster than RSA? If so, by how much?
And if it IS faster, wouldn't it be much more useful for web servers than for PDAs?
did yo momma drop u on ur head when u was a little rugrat worm you stupid piece of shit... go fuck off yourself u fucking scumbag
Not all such gifts are useful for the recipient, and some are genuinely harmful to the interests of open source users. So, do look a gift horse in the mouth, or you may be stuck with large vet bills otherwise.
This one seems harmless if it is on unpatented technology, or if the patents are free for use by open source.
Ah, the magic word: "Patent"
ECC algorithms have all sorts of submarine patents and prior art that have prevented widespread adoption. Sun's donation does not change that.
Too bad, coz ECC is way cool. I did a digital signature app with Certicom ECC that resulted in 42-byte signatures.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil
The BSD license is evil. It is a license to steal. Using it will only ensure that corporations will not contribute anything back to the community... ...What's that? Sun contributed back? Well, shit. That ruins that argument...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Then why don't you fix it yourself? Is RPM --rebuild too much trouble for you?
'elliptic curve' encryption technology, (developed by Whitfield Diffie of Diffie-Hellman public key fame)
Elliptic curve cryptography was indepentantly
invented by Neal Koblitz, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington and Victor Miller who was then at IBM.
(Source)
Whitfield Diffie is Sun's chief security officer, and co-invented public-key cryptography.
In fact, it has and can be easily shown that by solving "the factoring problem" (as it's oh-so-vulgarly put) or the discrete log problem of classical public key cryptosystems, one solves EC's. The problems are extensions of one another, and the solution to one is trivially deducible from the solution to another.
your statement was like saying "unlike Webster's Dictionary, the Oxford English Dictonary has no words in it" - pure and utter nonsense. gibberish.
All ECC's are (in boiled-down essence), is a Discrete Log problem on a cubic whose solutions are confined to a torus. (i.e. 'elliptic curve').
while it's true that the keysize needed for secure ECC is much, much smaller and increases much much more slowly than either DL (discrete log) or IF (integer factorization) [both of which are essentially exactly the same] systems, this has to do with the way the field is set up and how the keys correspond.
Applications like online wireless betting or online wireless reservations need better (read: quick) security in PDAs and mobile phones
But don't e-commerce apps typically have small data packets? Encrypting a tightly packed transaction on a 16 MHz ARM processor won't take very long.
Will I retire or break 10K?
> Now I can keep my pesky roommates out of my palm's oh-so-full social calendar.
Actually, this can be taken in more than one way, especially since "palm" isn't capitalized.
Well Arthur, it looks like this elipse has come full circle.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
We are techs/geeks, thats what we do. We don't politicize or make war! We do what we are best at.
And the fact that we're not politicizing may be part of the problem, and why (to try to make some semblance of being on-topic), we should be encouraging of companies that try to donate stuff back to the community. If we simply sit at our computers and code away, sure, that may be what we're best at, but then the rest of the world passes us by, and suddenly what we've always liked to work on is no longer relevant.
So I think it behooves us to get involved in the world past the computer. We can't live in our own little kingdoms, or we become just as bad as the monolithic companies we so like to criticize.
As for us not making war, I beg to differ. Here's a few wars that we are quite well-engaged in:
Really, if you look at it, the tech/geek culture is the world in microcosm.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
The Eliptic curve stuff was donated to OpenSSH team
No, the Elliptic Curve code was donated to OpenSSL. OpenSSL is used in, among other things, OpenSSH. The OpenSSL license is BSD-like, but not strictly a BSD license.
Additionally, it is very possible to accelerate SSL in hardware. In fact, the Sun project page itself talks about integrating ECC and SSL support into a hardware accellerator.
but so what?
a hu.ca
My crypto lib has supported [non-P1363] ECC crypto since quite sometime now. Big deal.
http://libtomcrypt.sunsite.dk
or
http://tom.i
I use ECC in the traditional ElGamal method without standard packet formats. But the idea is the same...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Additionally, it is very possible to accelerate SSL in hardware. In fact, the Sun project page [sun.com] itself talks about integrating ECC and SSL support into a hardware accellerator.
And there are lots of companies that sell stand-alone SSL accellerators.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Is it under a 4-clause or 3-clause BSD license? OpenSSL is _still_ under the 4-clause license, with the `obnoxious advertising clause' which says that you have to mention the developers in all advertising materials.
Not such a big deal, you might say, but there are two big problems with this: 1) It's incompatible with GNU GPL, so no straight GPL software can use OpenSSL, and 2) it causes huge practical problems.
Theses issues are a big problems for Debian, in particular.
Elliptic Curve Encription isn't 'owned' by Sun. Apple owns some pattent related to it that they got from NeXT (search for Richard Crandall). And it was invented by someone else entirely (see comments above).
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Let me think... Um, NO.
But I'm also not necessarily representative of most COBALT users. People who CAN build from source are generally not the target audience of the machine. They BOUGHT a Cobalt server as an appliance, which is what SUN markets it as. SUN says not to ever touch the CLI, as "The GUI does everything you need".
People buy a Cobalt from a big name vendor so they get the stability and resource-friendliness of Linux with (theoretically) the SUPPORT (in terms of patches and making the software easy to use and documentation) of a big name vendor.
So that's the problem.
(I love trolls who are such wizards about all this, but still post anonymously)
And likely they can crack everything else that's widely used.
:p
The important part is, some random ass out in the streets won't be able to crack it.
Like to make stuff? ReadyMade magazine [readymademag.com] is like Martha Stewart meets Wired.
I dig readymade magazine.. are you affiliated with them or just advertising because its a cool magazine?
Does anybody know of a secure surfing service that the government doesn't have a back door key to? IE SSL encryption is definitely out, and I'm not so sure about anonymizer.com, either.
Whitfield Diffie is Sun's chief security officer, and co-invented public-key cryptography.
Actually, Ralph Merkle invented public-key cryptography (too). Merkle's article was SUBMITTED first, though the Diffie-Hellman article was PUBLISHED first while Merkle's was still going through the review process.
Not to disparage any of 'em. Merkle and Diffie & Hellman both invented it separately.
And for you people who follow Nanotech and/or Cryonics, yes it's THAT Ralph Merkle (who didn't invent either cryonics or nanotech, though he does much great work to advance them).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Tom,
Your library is nice, it is portable C with tons of algorithms implemented. Test vectors. Most algorithms even have decently optimized implementations which is a plus.
But you lack protocols which are necessary to securely implement applications.
Using 3DES or AES is stupid if the application developer uses ECB (Electronic Code Book) mode of operation because it's faster and simpler. The application developer doesn't know that you need a HMAC to ensure intergity. What about replay attacks? Cut-and-paste attack?
I don't think you even have secure message padding for RSA implementation.
You have an interesting library of algorithms, but its is AFAIK lacking the "glue" to make it more useful than OpenSSL (which is ported and tested on many platforms, and heavily optimized assembly).
So to develop secure applications I will continue to use OpenSSL rather than LibTomCrypt. It is less work for me, simple as that. If you expand your work, that will end my complaints, and we'll both be happy.
Peace.
Look at Crypto++ benchmarks for a concrete example on a desktop machine (32-bit >>100 MHz x86 processor).
I do not have any benchmarks for low end processors. Sorry.
Well I agree I lack protocols support but that isn't to say I lack the basic algorithms. I have chaining mode wrappers [OFB,CFB,CTR,CFB] for the ciphers, etc..
In fact unlike the CryptLib and OpenSSL design my library is fully modular which means the OFB code for instance is not tied to one cipher. If you examine CryptLib [and from what I have seen of OpenSSL] they have implemented one OFB [etc] routine per cipher....
I agree though that protocol support is a good idea but thats not a be-all either.
Most protocols don't fully specify your PRNG/RNG source or how you should lock memory, store things on disk, etc...
In otherwords you can comply with say PKCS #1 and still have an insecure application.
Also unlike OpenSSL my library builds out of the box on virtually every GCC platform without configuration or patching. It even works on my Gameboy Advanced without changes!!!
In the long run I agree. I do plan on adding things like PKCS #1, P1363, etc... but in the short term I am more interested in getting mature, well documented primitives.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
sorry jackass, its an openbsd project. They get the credits.
Why not becoming a good Assembler hacker? :)
Later, you could have students, and more fun.
(just guessing)
Hope it helps
Rwe obliged 2 save our future by choosing:O3 hole-greenhouse effect instead of accepting everydays gossip-nonsense chat?
Not to mention one of the real unixes as open source would be neat.
...
FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin,
Yes, they're reall unices. They may not be able to use the trade mark, but they're a lot more UNIX than many an official UNIX.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I think a 16 MHz ARM processor would only be in a "high end" smart phone, or a PDA and not your mass market average cell phone.
What would a "mass market average cell phone" need with fast public-key encryption? Can't it just authenticate with the cell tower, grab a symmetric key, and then just encrypt voice with AES[1] based on that, possibly grabbing new symmetric keys during non-talk time? Wouldn't the more advanced "Burning Cell Phones" that run apps other than voice and simple games be essentially PDAs with a fast processor anyway?
Think 8 or 16 bit, less than 12 MHz on average.
So you're talking half the power of a GBA. (The GBA is 32-bit with a 16-bit data bus, clocked at 16 MHz.) How does RSA computation scale with respect to keylength?
[1] Yes, AES been theoretically attacked down to 96-bit, but 96-bit is still considered quite "strong" for symmetric encryption. It has taken nearly four years, and one of the world's biggest clusters still hasn't broken a 64-bit key.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'm not directly affiliated with them, but my girlfriend worked as an intern for them. :-)
There is a saying that in cryptography, there are three types of elliptic curves: the insecure ones, the inefficient ones, and those that have been patented by Certicom.
I wonder which curves can be used with the code offered by Sun.
I didn't think it was a conjecture anymore since Andrew Wiles proved it.
Wondering if its not because they "invented" it, but maybe because they hold the IP license for an implementatuin that they decided to allow OpenSSL to use under a free license..
--
Time is on my side
Back in the '60s, it had been invented at GCHQ by James Ellis for use by the British Secret Service. Unfortunately, due to the Official Secrets Act, Ellis was forbidden to publish or discuss his discovery.
The organisation that Ellis worked for, CESG, are on-line - you can check out their site here.
Here's a link to a page explaining their input into Public Key Crypto.
I'd first heard about Ellis' work in Simon Singh's book, The Code Book. James Ellis seemed to be a very quiet, modest person. It's a shame that his name isn't to the forefront when we think of Public-Key crypto. Credit where it's dueAlison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
I certainly agree with most of what you say.
If you want more developers to use your library, you need to make it easier for them to use libtomcrypt in a secure fashion.
That includes secure protocols (network, storage), consistant access to cryptographically strong PRNG/RNG, etc.
Standard protocols increase the usefullness because developers can use them to interact with other (often already existing) applications.
When you add these additional features I think you will then see an increase in interest in libtomcrypt.
The problem you are falling into is what I call the "magic button" thoerem. It states (falsely) that some magic button must exist that solves all problems.
Likewise for a crypto library there is no
int magic_button(pt, ct, key)
function since each system, os, cryptosystem is unique.
My library is not designed to solve just one problem. Its a well organized set of primitives and support routines that can be used.
Quite frankly if you're not smart enough to take primitives and make your own system that is secure you're in the wrong business.
That being said I have nothing against standards complaince. I want to add PKCS #1 support for instance, but even when I have PKCS #1 merged in libtomcrypt won't provide "magic button" support.
For instance, Wayne Scott [of bitkeepers.com] has recently tested libtomcrypt on 18 different platforms/os combos. With exception to a few problems [os'es without RNG's] the library worked statically [e.g. anywhere where an RNG is not needed] flawlessly
This follows my train of thought. You take my lib, add your system specific stuff and get a cryptosystem in return.
If I narrowed the system to say support "win32 magic buttons" I would instantly lose all my portableness
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
And I'm sorry about the +1 Funny moderation I gave you, but I thought it'd be funnier than a +1 Informative :-)
Slashdot is not the "Church of the All-Conquering Triumphant GPL". Sorry.
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise.
If everyone knows, why do you feel the need to post the same anti-BSD rant all the time? Presumably if *BSD is "dead", than one eulogy would be enough.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team.
Don't know about Michael Smith's contributions to FreeBSD(there are plenty more), but Jordan Hubbard has served mainly as a spokesman, not a developer for the core OS. Though his opinions were quite respected, his code contributions dwindled off long before he left the Core group (I'm not even sure that he's always been in Core up to now). A number of prominent developers have come and gone, but work continues on 5.0 and beyond. Strange how you were insisting that BSD was dead long before these two people left core. A number of months have passed since these last two resignations, and we're all still waiting for BSD to die.
Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress.
Hmmm, what do you call posting the same rant 100 times over? For that matter, what do you call Linux?
Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
So, is this a religious war over open source licensing, or did FreeBSD-core not like your shitty patches? Going by the FUD and rather obscure purple prose that you've been posting, I doubt you even know how to use a compiler. Speaking of "achievements", what are you accomplishing if your lengthy, insightful posts are routinely modded down? The funny thing is that XFree86, a project with a BSD-style licensing scheme, a product with a release cycle almost as slow as that ever-so-popular GNU HURD project, is software that few GNU/Linux users could do without. Odd too how FreeBSD developers had to jump on Linux developers for grabbing huge bits of BSD network stack code without giving credit where it was due. Gosh, it's just so terrible that Linux can get away with stealing BSD-licensed code! Apart from those two faced people who routinely bite the hand that feeds them, cross pollination between the various projects ought to be encouraged, and the BSD license is better for that sort of thing than the exceedingly political GNU scheme. It's also nice to know that those tyranical core BSD developers don't have to deal with a 100 pound gorilla like Redhat asserting its authority whenever it chooses.
I think what all this really boils down to is ideology: an open-ended debate over what "free" means versus "if you don't accept my definition of freedom, I'll bludgeon you to death". If your "arguments" had any merit in a free market place of ideas, you wouldn't need to repeat them much less shout them repeatedly. People are going to continue to use *BSD code because you can't tell them what to do and they're likely to know better than you anyway. Better luck next time.
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 12:38:11 -0600
From: Theo de Raadt
To: misc@cvs.openbsd.org
Subject: openssl
some of you asked us what that ECC donation from Sun to OpenSSL means.
so what does it mean?
it means that OpenSSL is becoming a non-free software project, because
the code from Sun contains licenses which invoke patent litigation;
the licence on the new code basically builds a contract that says "if
you use this code, you cannot sue Sun".
In such a way, by means of the slippery slope, a free software project
becomes not as free, and eventually, less and less free.
Before anyone speaks up about and says "that restriction does not
affect me". It does indirectly affect you. It means that some other
vendor that uses this code, and subsequently ends up having a spat
with Sun, ends up wasting money on legal efforts, and our entire
society pays for that. My take on it, is that this is the way the
legal industry ensures itself future work.
On the other hand, here in OpenBSD land we will continue to strive to
make our software more and more free. We've been squishing odd
license terms which contain non-free restrictions throughout the
source tree for about 2 years now.
once again, i think it is time to fork OpenSSL. It's obviously run by
a bunch of people who don't think through the legal implications of
their actions. they should NOT have accepted that code without it
being 100% free.
This donation is not free code. Shame on you Sun, and double shame on
you OpenSSL.
What Sun has gifted to OpenSL is an implementation of the elliptic curve technology. In addition, this elliptic curve crypto library is well integrated into the existing OpenSSL source structure. Devlopers can down load from the openssl.org website today a working and free version of openssl which performs SSL/TLS secure handshakes using Elliptic Curve cipher suites.
>The Eliptic curve stuff was donated to OpenSSH team, not the OpenSSL group.
>So dreaming about this in your ssl accelerated card of the future is a bit silly.
Not silly at all. The Elliptic Curve stuff was indeed donated to OpenSSL. Having this technology in your ssl accelerated card is actually quite doable and will happen soon. The ssl accelerator cards today accelerate RSA. Soon they accelerate both elliptic curve crypto and RSA.
http://research.sun.com/projects/crypto/Frequenly
It includes technical information and answers questions some people had about licensing.