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It is possible that an
OCF consumer needs to chain together a number of cryptographic
algorithms, but no hardware producer implements all these. Currently,
this would cause the session to be established on the software
pseudo-driver (which implements all algorithms). However, by
maintaining session information inside the OCF, it is possible to
create ``virtual sessions'' across multiple (hardware and software)
producers. In this case, the OCF will issue multiple sequential
requests to the various producers, invoking the consumer-specified
callback routine at the end. We have a prototype of this, but we need
to further evaluate the performance implications and trade-offs of
doing multiple PCI transactions.
Angelos D. Keromytis
3/25/2003