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Students Develop Open Crypto Chip
Stuttgart students develop crypto chip
The eight head team "pg99" at the computer science dept of stuttgart university under guidance from Dipl-Ing Gundolf Kiefer has developed a complete crypto chip, which can do RSA (768 bit) and DES. With DES, with is intended for large data volumes, the chip can to 168 MBit/sec. The higher level RSA is being used mainly for DES key exchange, for authentication and for digital signatures. The chip will to ~50 keys/sec in RSA. Communication with the environment can be done via a parallel interface (8, 16 or 32 bit) or via two-wire I2C bis, which can be found on many current motherboards (Intel calls this SMB).
The 100,000 gate chip will be produced by Alcatel in 0.35 m technology (compare this to the 134,000 gates in an 80286). Officially the chip will be unveiled at the 8th of July at the computer science faculty, where the VHDL source of the design will be made availabe as Open Source.
Firstly, and off-topic, no one in their right mind outside of Lower Slobovia thought the earth was flat. That's why the ancient Greeks (Aristhosthenes? Pythagoras?) were able to estimate the circumference of the earth to within a couple of kilometres using simple trigonometry.
The fact is that people's outlooks change. We /think/ that people thought the earth was flat, and now it's a general assumption - but untrue for the large part. No one thought to write in the inalienable right to privacy in the US' Constitution because no one ever tried to take it from them. It was a part of their lives, and no one would have *use* for these things.
In this day and age, privacy becomes very important -- and yet, the US is trying to take it away from the entire world - especially its citizens - with projects like ECHELON. It's about time that their constitution got changed to make privacy a right, the same way they have the inalienable right to bear arms (another thing which has changed over the years. "I have to defend myself against the King of England!" (Sorry, don't remember the exact quote from the Simpsons.))
Well, the device does DES and RSA, implying there's alot of good communications infrastructure, and that the encryption cores themselves are largely decoupled from the rest of the design. At least, that's what I'd hope they did, since it would make the part more valuable overall: You could plop the encryption cores into other chips that had different communication requirements easily, and you could drop different encryption cores into this chip easily.
If that's the case, then we can reuse all the communication bits, and replace the DES core with an RC5 key-crunching core. This is alot like the way d.net clients share the most of the same block management and network communication code between the DES and RC5 cores it has internally -- the key cruncher is actually a small (yet very important) part of the overall problem.
Ah, isn't 'open source' fun?
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
The natural question for many /.'ers that also participate in distributed.net is whether or not this will be useful for crunching keys.
I'm guessing, in it's base form, the device is tuned for (en|de)crypting large volumes of data with a fixed key, and that key reloads are expensive. Translation: It won't help a d.net-style keysearching effort much as-is.
Does anyone have more information on this to confirm or deny this conjecture?
Also, is anyone out there crazy enough (and skilled enough w/ VHDL) to hack this device into the world's fastest RC5 block cruncher? :-) Places like MOSIS will fab "educational" and "prototype" designs in small quantities for reasonable prices.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Yet more evidence that the U.S. Gov't's policy on export control of crypto products is obsolete. Sorry spooks, its already overseas, and its well known enough that students can even put it in hardware. Give up already.
Are you implying that you've already finished that giant?!
Here's a working link to the article.
--The more you know, the less you know.
Does anyone know how large a chip like this would be? It seems like at .35 with 100,000 gates it would be relatively tiny. So we should be able to fit 50+ of these on one PCI card. Have one 16 bit microcontroller + 16k ram on it. You should then be able to sell the PCI card and write a tiny driver to send/receive data from it. Or maybe combine 15 of these at a time on one chip and pop 4 of the chips on a PCI card, whatevers more economical. This would make an interesting card to pop in your slot. I've been wondering what to put in my last empty PCI slot...
The point of a chip like this is to have authentication happen on secure hardware, not an insecure host. This is useful in a lot of applications, especially smart card readers.
For example, monetary transactions - your smart card holds your key and the smart card reader does all of the authentication and sends a signed request to the merchant. That way, you don't have to worry about credit card numbers flopping around all over the place. The transaction takes place between your card and the vendor.
Another possible use could be for logging in - no more worrying about passwords because you can sign in with your key (stored on the smart card) and pin number.
Besides, we in America already have cool stuff like this. Check out http://www.nabletech.com and their N*Click chip
Invidia fortunum ovit.
When crypto becomes common, it will soon afterwards become mandatory. We will be required to include encrypted digital signatures in all email and usenet messages. This will lead to mandatory tracability of all traffic and end-to-end validation of all communications. Traffic that isn't signed will be deleted at servers as spam. Unsigned messages will be banned from email servers. It's an inevitable part of the 'net becoming mainstream and secure enough for commerce.