It's cute to observe that Atalla having no RSA-specific form of mod_exp
causes a DSA server to achieve about 6 times as many signatures per
second than an RSA server. :-)
Atalla card, you should be able to compile with the "hw-atalla" switch
with "./config" or "perl Configure", and then you can use the command-
line switch "-engine atalla" inside speed, s_cient and s_server (after
checking out note (1)).
Notes:
(1) I've turned on native name translation when loading the shared-
library, but this means that the Unix shared library needs to be
libatasi.so rather than atasi.so. I got around this in my testing
by creating a symbollic link from /usr/lib/libatasi.so to the real
library, but something better will be needed. It also assumes in
win32 that the DLL will be called atasi.dll - but as I don't have
a win32/atalla environment to try I have no idea yet if this is
the case.
(2) Currently DSA verifies are not accelerated because I haven't yet
got a mod_exp-based variant of BN_mod_exp2_mont() that yields
correct results.
(3) Currently the "init()" doesn't fail if the shared library can
load successfully but the card is not operational. In this case,
the ENGINE_init() call will succeed, but all RSA, DSA, DH, and
the two BN_*** operations will fail until the ENGINE is switched
back to something that does work. I expect to correct this next.
(4) Although the API for the Atalla card just has the one crypto
function suggesting an RSA private key operation - this is in
fact just a straight mod_exp function that ignores all the RSA
key parameters except the (private) exponent and modulus. This is
why the only accelerator work is taking place inside the mod_exp
function and there's no optimisation of RSA private key operations
based on CRT etc.
