Re: Asymmetric cryptography HW offloading

[Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <nmav@gnutls.org>]

On 09/27/2013 12:58 PM, Horia Geantă wrote:

> Thanks for the tip.
> I took a look at BSD - AFAICT there is no SW implementation and crypto
> engine drivers handle only the first two operations (MOD_EXP).
> 
> My main concern now is the asymmetric ciphers API, that would eventually
> allow implementing the operations in SW/HW.
> I was wondering whether the same logic as for symmetric ciphers
> could/should be used (the API layering mentioned in
> Documentation/crypto/api-intro.txt).
> For example, crypto/asymmetric_keys/rsa.c could be registered and then
> used via Crypto API:
> rsa.c: crypto_alg->cra_name = "rsa";

As RSA fits into the encryption API it may be just ok. I'd say do it and
then we see whether that API causes some bottleneck for asymmetric
encryption. But how would you fit modexp in that case?

Having the expensive big number operations could be useful to non-crypto
number crunching projects as well (e.g. gmp and its users).

regards,
Nikos