At 07:04 AM 10/23/03 -0700, Steve Schear wrote:

At 11:04 PM 10/22/2003 -0700, Lucky Green wrote:

...

bottleneck tends to be modular exponentiations, yet VIA failed to include a modular exponentiation engine. Strange.

Cylink made it mark in the early 90s by building the first commercial modular exponentiation chips to power its encryptor boxes. So the need for it this was well known even then.

Yes, because CPUs couldn't/can't keep up with SSL's DH modexp at *commercial server* rates. For lower rates, eg initiating a secure phone call, or the client-side of SSL, you can tolerate the delay of using a CPU. You only dedicate hardware if you need to do something a lot, and fast. Could be polygons on a gaming video board, mbuff operations in a network processor [1], or modexp on an SSL enhancer. [1] look into Intel's IXA processors. They have hardware support for everything you do in IP stack processing. Amazing. Later versions also include linerate AES. For large values of "linerate".