Folks, There has been some discussion of late on this list about Hifn's policy with respect to releasing documentation to the general public. That discussion lead to a great deal of uninformed speculation and unflattering statement's about Hifn's unfriendliness towards the open source community. I would like to set the record straight.
The simple fact is that anyone who wants access to Hifn's documentation need only log on to our extranet site (http://extranet.hifn.com/home/) to download as much as they like. This is true of the 795x Algorithm accelerator chips and the 7855 and 8155 HIPP chips. Some more restrictions may apply to our NP and flow through part documents. Specifically the documentation for 7954, 7955 and 7956 is available. The other chips that are supported by the Open BSD Crypto drivers hifn(4), lofn(4) and nofn(4) (7751, 7811,7951, 9751, 6500, 7814, 7851 and 7854) are legacy parts that are not recommended for new designs. The driver will also work for 7954 even though that is not listed. This does represent some liberalization of access in recent months. Hifn is always monitoring its policy with respect to the confidentiality of documentation and other business information. Some information will probably always require a non-disclosure agreement. Information that falls into that category is generally of a sensitive competitive nature, contains trade secrets or is related to unanounced or unreleased products. Software licenses are generally restricted in the disclosure or source code reproduction rights. Hifn reserves the right to keep our source code proprietary. This should not affect the hifn(4) driver since that driver is programmed directly to the hardware and does not use Hifn's enablement software library. Registration at our extranet is required along with an email address that can be confirmed. We cannot support anonymous FTP or http downloads. The reason for this is that we are required by the conditions of our US export licenses to know who and where our customers are. If anyone objects to registration then we could not sell them chips anyway so it does not seem an unreasonable restriction to us. I hope that this clears the air. Best regards, Hank Cohen Product Line Manager Hifn Inc. 750 University Ave Los Gatos Ca. 95032 408-399-3593
