Hewlett-Packard Co is to OEM cryptographic accelerator chips from Rainbow Technologies Inc for its HP 9000 servers. Irvine, California-based dongle maker Rainbow now also sells co- processors to speed up encryption, and says its PCI board CryptoSwift accelerators are capable of handling over 200 transactions per second, and can perform a reference RSA signature in 5 milliseconds. A 400MHz Pentium II processor would take five times longer to do the same task, according to Rainbow. HP will use the accelerator in conjunction with its secure web server, providing a boost in performance for customers running SSL and SET security protocols for secure e-commerce applications. HP expects cryptographic accelerator cards to be in the first quarter of 1999 in the US and Canada, and is working on an agreement for worldwide exports.
