Is there any more "modern" DES hardware that's "commonly" available?
How much do these things cost? Anyone build any nice cheap SCSI
attached peripheral that you can shoot data at and get it back
encrypted or decrypted? Put a nice noise diode in it for a source for
cryptographic quality random numbers, and we'd really be cooking.
A couple of DECUS conferences back Digital demoed a little box they called a
Cryptonette. It looked pretty much like a 10baseT MAU gadget, but inside
there's a chip called a Tandu. Built using Digital's CMOS-4 technology, this
chip contains two ethernet transcievers and a high speed DES unit.
The idea here is that you hook this thing up between your workstation and the
network. It can do a whole bunch of things: you can send it packets and it will
encrypt/decrypt them and send them back to you. Or you can download a filtering
scheme to it and it will encrypt/decrypt packets on their way to/from the
network. And of course it can simply pass packets through untouched.
I believe that the DES unit is actually running below speed in the Tandu; there
was talk about doing similar things on an FDDI wire or in a TurboChannel or
fast SCSI peripheral.
Since there's really only a single chip in the thing it should be fairly cheap
in quantity. I cannot speak to Digital's plans for it though -- I only saw a
technical demonstration and the folks doing it were engineers, not marketeers.
Ned
P.S. There's an amusing export restriction story associated with the
Cryptonette. It was designed by DEC Israel engineers. However, the CMOS-4
process is currently only available in the US, so the chips were manufactured
there. DEC obtained an one-off export license to send the the resulting silicon
back the Israel. Then came the DECUS show in Atlanta. DEC Israel sent a couple
of their engineers to the show along with a bunch of Cryptonettes. But once the
show was over they couldn't send them back, so I believe boxes in Atlanta ended
up getting destroyed. (Needless to say, I asked if I could have one. Alas, that
was not to be...)