2048 or 4096 for new keys? aka defaults vs. Debian

Filip M. Nowak gnupg at oneiroi.net
Sun Oct 27 20:05:27 CET 2013


Hi,

On 10/27/2013 07:47 PM, Peter Lebbing wrote:
> On 27/10/13 19:09, Filip M. Nowak wrote:
>> 1) Specialized microcontrollers with crypto capabilities are available
>> and used for years now (AVR XMEGA which is 8 bit for example)
> 
> AVR XMEGA has DES and AES, no asymmetric acceleration. Also, I think the market
> of XMEGA is phenomenally tiny compared to regular AVR/PIC (personally, I would
> go to ARM if megaAVR isn't enough).

Well, market for them is tiny, I think this is true. Reason could be
that it's all about cost cutting nowadays and not much vendors views
crypto as necessary feature or good selling point within
customer-oriented market. So it seems to be less about availability of
the technology and more about market trends and people's mindset.

Anyway - perhaps Robert will pick up this topic as he mentioned
microcontrollers first.

> Are there 8-bit microcontrollers with RSA acceleration?

Not sure. From my experience FPGAs are used for this purpose quite often
(for example in security accelerator cards and appliances). I have
really limited awareness of software implementations of asymmetric
crypto for microcontrollers and I don't know their quality, standards
implemented and completeness.

> HTH,
> 
> Peter.
> 

	Best regards,
	Filip



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