hardware crypto and SSL?

[Bill Swingle]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 07:04:53AM -0700, Michael Sierchio wrote:
> Eric Anderson wrote:
> 
> >The new VIA Eden-N processors have built in high-speed AES encryption 
> 
> Forgive me, but that's really not important -- for SSL the bulk
> encryption algorithm is usually RC4 (oops, ARCFOUR ;-), which
> is efficient in software .  It's the handshake and public key
> operations that really benefit from the use of HW crypto.
> 
> In which case the currently-supported cards (either by the
> OpenBSD /dev/crypto scheme ported by Sam Leffler, or those
> directly supported in the OpenSSL engine) all work fine.
> 
> IOW the current Soekris boards help quite a bit, and they
> also help because they have a HW RBG which actually stirs
> the entropy pool for /dev/random -- very helpful for not
> running out of random bits on machines that have no
> keyboard or mouse.

When you say that they help quite a bit, do you mean for http+SSL or
some other application?

What I'm getting at is this: can anyone actually confirm that using
hardware crypto can increase http+SSL speeds? I've yet to find any
mention of it on the web.

(Basicly the problem I'm trying to solve is for a web-based app that we
recently discovered is tons faster without SSL but SSL is a requirement)

-Bill

-- 
-=| Bill Swingle - <unfurl@(dub.net|freebsd.org)>
-=| Every message PGP signed
-=| PGP Fingerprint: C1E3 49D1 EFC9 3EE0 EA6E  6414 5200 1C95 8E09 0223
-=| "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers" Pablo Picasso 



-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-security/attachments/20031022/bffd5239/attachment.bin