Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1993 15:46-0500 From: Peter Meyer <meyer@mcc.com>
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1993 15:07 CDT From: "Perry E. Metzger" <pmetzger@lehman.com>
"Haywood J. Blowme" says: [Lots about some J. Random Companies encryption chip]
All fine and well, but since we have IDEA already, why should we want it? For virtually all applicatons these days other than fully encrypting network traffic, software is fine. DES implementations in software can handle 1.5 Mbit/s on reasonable machines. [...]
[...]
There are lots of other things to be considered besides the algorithm itself when designing good encryption software, e.g. if someone accidentally yanks out the power cord to the computer during decryption do you kiss goodbye to the data?
Well, what if I need to the capability of doing 5-10 Mbyte/s? I am still haisng out a few design details of a "secure" BSD using encryption of the filesystem before I hit the code and right now this particular issue is one that I have still not worked out. I need it in hardware. Software is just not fast enough and I a not sure how much work it will require to get a DES card to do E(K1,D(K2,E(K1,x))) if I want to use 128 bit keys. Does anyone know if there is a hardware implementation of IDEA or another algorithm of suitable cryptographic strength available in a card or chip? Then again, maybe I could use a clipper chip... (big ;-) jim