Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

Alex made me aware of a nice article on Intel's work on tuning the already fast openssl cryptographic libraries. The paper is written by Muneesh Nagpal, server applications engineer, Core Software Division; Gururaj Nagendra, senior software engineer and architect, Software Products Division, SSG; and Alexey Omeltchenko, software engineer, Software Enabling Division, Intel Corp.

The article is titled "Boosting cryptography performance with Intel libraries" and a preview is here:

"This simple optimization walk-through improves an already-optimized sample OpenSSL application's performance by 35 percent using Intel® cryptography library functions. With the increase in e-commerce and other transactions in enterprise applications, the demand for higher-performing, secure, and scalable communications is on the rise. From a hardware perspective, as the communication load increases, load balancing is typically accomplished by adding more processors."

Why is this of interest to us Oracle security types? - well because the current crop of Oracle password crackers are cracking DES and some like orabf and checkpwd use openssl. This means that Oracle password crackers will run around 40% faster simply by recompiling or relinking.