qBang Solutions Blog » Programming

Speed up encryption with PadLock

Josh Kuo — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 07:34:26 +0000

(Article originally posted at InfoWorld Magazine)

Security is a topic that is getting more and more attention these days, and encryption plays a large role in security. However, those of us who have played with encryption know that it consumes a significant amount of system resources. If you are doing your encryption in software, you are most likely playing a catch-up game to your network speed (when encryption network traffic) and storage volume (when encrypting file system).

The tradition approach is to get an encryption card and drop it into your PCI slot. But have you checked out encryption built directly into the CPU? This is not exactly news, since VIA Technologies has been making CPU’s with encryption built-in since 2004. VIA processors with PadlLock has SHA1-256 (Secure Hashing Algorithm), AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), and random number generator all built into the hardware.

So how fast is hardware encryption? In this benchmark, you can see that a 1.2GHz VIA processor can encrypt about 5 to 16 times faster than a Pentium IV 2.4GHz. And in this benchmark, where the author tests against encrypted file system and IPSec connections, there is almost no slow down when doing IPSec with PadLock, and you only lose about 10% of performance when writing to encrypted file system. Compare that to software encryption where you are looking at roughly 50% to 80% loss in performance.

Josh Kuo
Co-Owner of q!Bang Solutions

Travel Back Vim Time

Josh Kuo — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 02:25:44 +0000

Cheesy title, I know. But this is one of the two features I was waiting for in Vim 7.0 (the other is tabs): go back in time. Everyone (especially programmers) has run into this situation at some point: you know you want to uncover the version you have that doesn’t cause the segmentation fault, and you know that’s the version from 45 minutes ago. I can already hear some people whisper “version control”, but not everyone has SVK, and not everyone commits regularly. Well, now you can travel back in time easily with Vim, just issue this command and you’re back to the version from 45 minutes ago:

:earlier 45m

And to go forward in time, just do this:

:later 30s

You can manipulate time in Vim like Super Hiro, and you don’t even have to make the funny face!

Stefan Esser quits PHP Security Response Team

Josh Kuo — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 22:54:43 +0000

Although this announcement was made last year, I did not catch it until today on darknet. This is sad news, and in my opinion, a big blow to PHP’s developer’s community. There are other efforts out there trying to improve PHP’s inherently weaker security model, such as the new PHPSec.org and the hardened-php folks. For those of you who know me well, you know that although I use PHP, I am not a huge fan of it. For some reason, some people argue that this is an easy language to pick up for beginners. I can only guess that it is because PHP is very “graphical” and users can generate web pages with ease. But as far as a language goes, I would think that python is a much easier language to pick up for beginners.