At 2:39 PM 9/27/95, Simon Spero wrote:

Somebody mentioned the possibility of using the a/d stage of a sound card as a source of random bits, and that brought a thought back to mind: given that a lot of sound cards are now shipping with DSP chips on board, has anyone written any code that uses the cards DSP to accelerate RSA processing?

Maybe there's a mass market market for a crypto-blaster- an RNG, 3 or 6 DES chips, and a DSP. It would make for a killer linux based SHTTP server...

But I don't think Soundblaster-class DSP performance is especially impressive compared to where the market is going with Pentiums. (AMD and Cyrix have both announced plans to exit the 486 market as rapidly as they can--and of course Intel has been doing that for some time already.) It made more sense 2-3 years ago, and a couple of people were talking about finding ways to use modems and DSP cards to accelerate crypto functions. (Paul Rubin, for example, was looking at Trailblazer modems...) Another problem with such solutions is that they often get marginalized, or left on the sidelines. This has to do with lots of things, including the percentage of people who have various add-on cards, the power of their main CPUs, etc. (Many things to touch on here. Apple used a DSP chip in their 840av and 660av models, but various problems in supporting these chips cropped up, and Apple phased them out in favor of PPC-only configurations. Intel is pushing "native signal processing" to both sell faster CPUs and ease the programming efforts in supporting DSP chips. Time will tell.) For other reasons, software solutions are generally preferable to hardware-dependent solutions. Finally, few crypto applications seem to be limited very much by speed at this time. Audio and video apps, of course, put a strain on processing power, and this is where DSP capabilities make the most difference, probably. Finally (for real), the effort in supporting DSP chips could probably better be spent elsewhere, given the small effects of a slight increase in speed. Getting PGP more widely integrated into popular programs would seem to me to be a bigger win than in reducing the time to encrypt a message from 3.2 seconds to 1.9 seconds. --Tim May ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."