[Cryptech Tech] goals / use cases

[Peter Gutmann]

Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> writes:

>does it suffice to divide the use cases into 2-3 taxa?
>  o key generation/store/sign/validate/... (dnssec, rpki, tor consensus)
>  o low speed encryption (pgp, small vpn, ...)
>  o encryption (tls, vpn, ...)

That's really just a way of saying "everything" though.  I think we need some
more concrete targets, for example how much RAM will be available, and will it
be dynamically or statically allocated?  How many keys can be stored?  How
much flash will be available?  For example a single statically-allocated (at
system build time) RSA key is very different from fifty dynamically-allocated
{ RSA, DSA, ECDSA, DH } keys in terms of memory usage and requirements.  How
long should a 2Kbit private-key operation take?  A millisecond, a hundred ms,
a second, ten seconds?  Without some sort of yardstick to use as a target,
it's hard to tell whether we're winning/losing, or even on the right track...

Peter.