Hi,
Having engine to be a loadable module seems to be a very flexible way of
supporting hardware accelerators.

The engine support so far is limited to rsa public/private operations ,
encryption and decryption, modexp etc. which gives flexibility to the
companies developing hardware accelerators to develop their own engine. But
now lets think about expanding its functionality to support higher level
functions that would do more than just encryption/decryption like:

* generating client and server finished messages from clien key exchange,
random values and rest of the handshake messages.
* generating certificate verify message in client authentication mode.
* record processing functions

I have modified openssl0.9.6 for the ssl processor developed by Cavium
Networks which is a programmable ssl engine with all of these (and more)
functionalities supported in hardware. We have developed an API layer and
device drivers for openssl to talk to the chip and I have modified openssl
to make our API calls at appropriate places.

I foresee that these next generation of security processors that do ssl
protocol processing in hardware would be very much welcomed as they take
virtually everything off the host processor and which would now do only book
keeping of ssl states and tcp/ip processing. So now it would be a good time
to start thinking about providing some sort of support in openssl for these
type of processors.

Thanks,
Imran.









-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Richard Levitte - VMS
Whacker
Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2002 4:25 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Adding a new hardware accelerator


From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Christian.Gohmann> My questions are:
Christian.Gohmann> - How can I distribute my code to have CryptOn2
Christian.Gohmann> integrated into openssl-engine-0.9.6x?

You send the changes to [EMAIL PROTECTED]  I can't guarantee
that it'll get, since that depends on both time and policy.

Christian.Gohmann> - I looked into the current snapshot and found a
Christian.Gohmann> lot of changes within the engine part. It seems to
Christian.Gohmann> me that hardware accelerated symmetric crypto and
Christian.Gohmann> hashing will also be supported by the future 0.9.7
Christian.Gohmann> release of openssl. How can I support you with the
Christian.Gohmann> 0.9.7 integration? Do I concentrate on the engine
Christian.Gohmann> adaption or on OpenBSD's /dev/crypto or on a
Christian.Gohmann> PKCS#11 module?

If you look closer, you will see that there is already an
implementation for OpenBSD's /dev/crypto.  You may want to take a look
at it and try it out.

Also, you may have discovered that engines in 0.9.7 can be implemented
as separate dynamically loadable libraries.  For an example, look in
demos/engines/rsaref/.  This means that you can support the engine
part of your board and distribute it yourselves.  We don't mind having
it as part of the source, but we can't absolutely guarantee that we'll
maintain it ourselves.

Christian.Gohmann> -  Do you need some CryptOn2 boards to verify the
Christian.Gohmann> functionality?

If nothing else, I'd find it pleasing to play with that.  On a more
serious note, having some boards and libraries from vendors to play
with can help us enhance the ENGINE framework to reach a higher level
of flexibility.  After all, what we have implemented so far has partly
been to meet the needs of the hardware interfaces we've used until
now.

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