The new Intel Westmere microprocessor has six new instructions to accelerate AES encryption, Dan Anderson blogs. They are called "AESNI" for "AES New Instructions," and are unprivileged instructions, so no "root", other elevated access, or context switch is required to execute these instructions. These instructions are used in a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine available in Solaris 11, the aesni engine. The combination of these solutions makes e-commerce cryptographic operations easier and lower in cost, Anderson contends. He identifies the six instructions and discusses their use with the Oracle Solaris 11 and OpenSSL software optimizations.
(Get More Information . .)
Among the important new features of the SPARC T4 microprocessor are several new instructions available to perform cryptography functions in hardware, according to a blog post from Dan Anderson. These instructions are used in the OpenSSL 1.0 t4 engine available in Solaris 11. These new crypto instructions are different from previous generations of SPARC hardware, which has separate crypto processing units. The major difference lies in solving the problem of kernel and buffer overhead, Anderson writes. These new instructions are non-privileged: any program can create or use these instructions—no kernel environment, root permissions, or special setup is needed, he explains.
(Get More Information . .)
The Oracle SPARC T4 processor is faster than the Intel Xeon X5690 (with AES-NI) and the IBM POWER7. On single-thread OpenSSL encryption, Oracle's 2.85 GHz SPARC T4 processor is 4.3 times faster than the 3.5 GHz IBM POWER7 processor, and on single-thread OpenSSL encryption, the 2.85 GHz SPARC T4 processor is 17% faster than the 3.46 GHz Intel Xeon X5690 processor. The SPARC T4 processor has Encryption Instruction Accelerators for encryption and decryption for AES and many other ciphers.
(Get More Information . .)
Hudson 1.365 is out and it contains a critical security fix, correcting the vulnerability reported by InfraDNA, which pointed out attackers could read arbitrary files in the server file system whose path names are known, by sending malicious HTTP GET requests. For those unfamiliar with Hudson, it monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron. Among those things, Hudson focuses on are building/testing software projects continuously and monitoring executions of externally-run jobs.
(Get More Information . .)
News and Solutions for Users of Solaris, Java and Oracle's Sun hardware products
Just the news you need, none of what you don't –
42,000+ Members – 24,000+ Articles Published since 1998
