Some of you might remember I posted about the VIA C7 a while ago. If not I suggested that its hardware 1-cycle RNG, AES, SHA-1 / SHA-256 hashing and "Montgomery multipliers" could make for a great low power freenet box, provided it could be made to support them. They still aren't out (apparently they ship in quantity next month) so overall performance is still a bit of an unknown, but appears to be reasonable given the power consumption, especially given the extremely fast crypto performance.
VIA have recently released a JCP (Java Crytography Provider) which overloads things like SecureRandom with padlock accelerated versions :) The current release only supports the hardware AES and RNG, but support for SHA hashing and the MM's will be in a future release. Win32 and Linux are supported, and a nice suprise is that it appears to come with full source code under a BSD-with-advertising-clause like license so the security conscious or performance freaks could presumably compile it themselves. VIA press release : http://www.via.com.tw/en/initiatives/padlock/via-jcp.jsp JCP itself : http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageID=22&DSCat=162&DCatType=1 Techy overview (multilined for gmane) https://embeddedjava.dev.java.net/community_site/ articles/viajcp_embeddedjavacommunity_article.pdf Bob
