Testbed

  For our tests, we use two identical machines. The machines have 1.4 Ghz Pentium III processors on Tyan Thunder HEsl-T motherboards. These motherboards have three independent PCI busses: 32bit/33Mhz/5V, 64bit/66Mhz/5V, and 64bit/66Mhz/3.3V. The boards use 512MB of 133Mhz registered SDRAM and are based on the ServerWorks HESL chipset. We placed the crypto card being tested either on the 64bit/66mhz/3.3V bus or the 32bit/33Mhz/5V bus, as appropriate for the card. The crypto cards we used are:

• Broadcom 5805 reference design board (32bit).
• Broadcom 5820 reference design board (64bit).
• GTGI XL-Crypt (based on the Hifn 7811 chip) (32bit).
• NETSEC 7751 (based on the Hifn 7751 chip) (32bit).
• Hifn 6500 reference design board (32bit).
• Hifn 7814 reference design board (64bit).

The Hifn data-sheet gives a peak performance for the 7751 chip of 62 Mbps for encryption and 110 Mbps decryption, when using IPsec with 3DES/SHA1/LZS (LZS is a data-compression algorithm). When the 3DES engine alone is used, both encryption and decryption throughput are 83 Mbps. Broadcom's web site places the peak performance of the 5820 chip at 310 Mbps of 3DES-SHA1, when used in IPsec. Furthermore, they claim 800 1024-bit RSA signature computations per second.