http://www.planetit.com/techcenters/docs/security/news/PIT20010418S0005
by Will Wade
April 18, 2001
SAN FRANCISCO - A security system startup venture has taken the wraps
off a new type of encryption-processing scheme that it claims can
increase performance over competing technologies by as much as
tenfold.
As a result, Andes Networks Inc. expects to see the cost of
implementing security features fall so low, so fast, that all traffic
over the public Internet could be encrypted within a few years.
The company has focused on the secure sockets layer (SSL) format,
which has become a de facto standard for Web traffic. Although it is
not often used for full encryption and authentication operations, SSL
is built into every Web browser and is therefore available to anybody
using the Internet.
Andes announced recently at the RSA Conference 2001 that it is
sampling an SSL accelerator system, a box designed to sit in Internet
data centers and whose sole function is to decode encrypted traffic as
it comes in, and add encryption to traffic on the way out. It is
scheduled to begin commercial shipments next quarter.
"Our system is the first commercial implementation of a new-generation
technology, which redefines the standards of SSL processing," said
Paul Gordon, president and chief executive officer of Andes, Mountain
View, Calif.
While current systems may perform anywhere from 200 to 1,500 RSA
operations/second, which is the basic function of decryption traffic
based on the industry-standard RSA algorithms, Gordon said Andes'
system can do 15,000 RSA operations every second.
In addition, he said the crop of systems can support handshakes with
up to 750 new SSL clients per second, while the Andes version handles
5,000 such transactions.
Although SSL is deployed all through the Internet, it is not widely
used. Gordon estimated that only about 6 to 7 percent of Internet
traffic is encrypted, usually e-commerce and other financial
transactions.
A big part of the reason for this is speed: According to some
estimates, it can take as much as 50 times longer to send an
SSL-encrypted data stream from one computer than to send non-encrypted
data.
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Received on Fri Apr 20 03:20 CDT 2001