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The First Step to Cypherspace?
bughunter writes "Need to encrypt/decrypt your net traffic at up to 6.7 Gigabits per second? Using an ASIC instantiation of DES, pipeline archetecture, and single-cycle key/mode switching, Sandia National Labs has got the hardware you need. They say that this device can actually support almost 10 Gbps, but they haven't tried to run it that fast? and if you used parallel ASICs, you could get to 1 Tbps. And since it's an ASIC, any encryption scheme could be used. Anyone else see where this could lead? " Drool.
...getting people to use encryption routinely is.
It's not like people don't use encryption because it is too slow. People don't use encryption because
(1) Both parties must use encryption. If you'd like your e-mail to be encrypted, but your grandma/girlfriend/business partner think you are silly, what do you do? You use plain-text e-mail.
(2) It's a hassle to set up and use
(3) People underestimate how easy it is to read other people's e-mail and tend to forget basic stuff such as the fact that your employer *owns* all e-mail on your office computer and has (or could easily have) a log of all the sites on the Web you've visited.
(4) People do believe in security through obscurity: "There is nothing in my e-mail/browsing/ftping that is of interest to anybody".
I can go on and on... Really, I don't think that increasing the speed of encryption will help any of the current problems crypto is having. And I don't know why they picked DES to implement into the ASIC -- nowadays DES is pretty useless.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Dedicated encryption hardware. People are going to want this type of thing in lots of hardware. It'll be implement as an ASIC that will divulge a public key to anyone. The U.S. government is not going to like that, because they want it to be nice and easy for their (thought) police to spy on their citizens. So before anything like this goes into mass production, the government will insist that their be a code to get the thing to spit out its private key, and the government will be able to decode our data.
Paranoia? Certainly. Is it justified? Given what the U.S. government has been like lately, it might be. Time will tell.
Let's stick to software encryption. You can write your own, which makes it really hard for the government to screw with it.
-Ender
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.