[Cryptech Announce] Fwd: CrypTech 4.0 - way faster

[Paul Selkirk]

The CrypTech team is thrilled to announce version 4.0 of firmware and
FPGA bitstream for the CrypTech Alpha board, with significant
performance improvements.

The Alpha can now achieve more than 95 signatures/second with a 2048-bit
RSA key, and more than 130 sig/sec with a custom RSA-only (no ECDSA)
bitstream. This compares to less than 15 sig/sec with the previous
release (3.0, 2019-09-03).

For those interested in the nitty-gritty, all tests were conducted with
sw/libhal/tests/parallel-signatures.py (from the source package), which
uses multiple concurrent signers to sign a short message with a 2048-bit
key. In the last release, peak performance came with 3 signers, at
14.898 sig/sec. In this release, peak performance came with 5 signers,
at 95.122 sig/sec. For the RSA-only bitstream, peak performance came
with 7 signers, at 132.414 sig/sec. Even with only one signer,
performance went from 6.924 sig/sec to 28.220 sig/sec.

Debian (Stretch, Buster), Ubuntu (Xenial, Bionic), and MacOS packages
have been pushed to public repositories.