[Cryptech Tech] goals / use cases

[Leif Johansson]

On 01/24/2015 06:40 PM, Fredrik Thulin wrote:
> On Saturday, January 24, 2015 09:19:01 PM Randy Bush wrote:
> ...
>> so, for giggles, let's say serious tls and circuit level crypto are a
>> later design, and the alpha target is dnssec signing (and validation?),
>> rpki, tor consensus, and, for giggles, pgp (at human rates).
>>
>> folk such as rob, jakob, and linus (on family leave) should be able to
>> transform the dnssec, rpki, and tor consensus use cases into estimates
>> of the number of keys, rate of change, algorithms, need for speed to
>> validate, etc.
> 
> Thank you Randy, I have been thinking of how we could approach the discussion 
> of specifications for the Alpha board again for a couple of days. 
> 
> It seemed like a chicken and egg problem where some people has said we need 
> requirements in order to specify the technical solution, but since we're 
> mostly a bunch of engineers without a PHB to come up with the requirements I 
> had a hard time seeing how to address this. You anchoring one of the tents 
> pins in the ground works for me =).
> 
> Could we get consensus for Randy's proposal to aim for working and secure, but 
> not necessarily fast ("fast" being something we would measure in megabits/s) 
> for the Alpha board?

For the applications I want to play with that is certainly true.

> 
> Joachim has made a proposal for an FPGA. Although $350 per FPGA sounded pricey 
> even for an Alpha board to me, I think he put forward good reasons for that 
> size of FPGA so I won't object.


Me neither. Even if this was a price issue at this point (which it is
not really) paying on the order of 1-2k for an HSM is still almost 2
orders of magnitude cheaper that what I pay now for commercial HSMs

> 
> What methodology can we use to choose MCU? I think the choice at this time is 
> either for an ARM Cortex M4 (later on perhaps upgraded to pin compatible new 
> M7), or Cortex A8/A9. I think both will work for this "not necessarily fast" 
> target, but there would/could be a huge difference in how we do development in 
> the next year or so based on this choice.
> 
> /Fredrik
> 
> PS. I have a lead for a place in Sweden that would likely be able to assemble 
> boards for us once we have a design, if having them made in Asia is 
> troublesome (thinking of shipping time etc.).
> 
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