----- Forwarded message from "Perry E. Metzger"
some years back, i was part of a debate on the relative value of crypto - and it was pointed out that for some sectors, crypto ensured _failure_ simply because processing the bits introduced latency. for these sectors, speed was paramount.
think HFT or any sort of "Flash Mob" event where you want in/out as quickly as possible.
The latency cost of a stream cipher implemented in hardware can be as little as the time it takes a single XOR gate to operate -- which is to say, low even by the standards of my friends who do high frequency trading (many of whom do, in fact, claim to encrypt most of their communications). Certainly crypto is not the only (or even most important) way to make systems secure. In breaking in to a system, implementation bugs are where you look, not cracking cipher keys. However, latency qua latency seems like a poor reason to avoid encrypting your traffic. It might, of course, be a reason to avoid certain architectural decisions in how you use the crypto -- a public key operation per packet would clearly add unacceptable latency in many applications. Perry -- Perry E. Metzger perry@piermont.com _______________________________________________ The cryptography mailing list cryptography@metzdowd.com http://www.metzdowd.com/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5