Jan Pechanec's weblog

I co-authored a paper titled: "Transparent Multi-core Cryptographic Support on Niagara CMT Processors" along with James Hughes, Gary Morton, Lawrence Spracklen, Krishna Yenduri, and Christoph Schuba. This has been accepted for the International Workshop on Multicore Software Engineering in Vancouver. Lawrence will present there. Thanks to Christoph who put us together and also assumed a role of an editor of the paper. Christoph's blog entry has more details, including a link to the paper itself.

In my first OpenSolaris blog post, I explained why we decided to add some additional information into the default OpenSSL version string. In the current OpenSolaris 2008.11 release it says:[Read More]

We admit that SunSSH versioning could have been more helpful during the last few years. However, there were a few good reasons for the fact that the version number hasn't changed much... [Read More]

I'd like to explain two SSH messages that are seen from time to time. Those are generic SSH protocol version 2 messages but the actual wording can change, of course. The wording here comes from OpenSSH (and thus was inherited by SunSSH).[Read More]

As noted in the SunSSH with HW crypto announcement in September we worked on backporting this to S10. I'm glad to say that this week the code went to the S10U7 code base which, as of now, seems to be released during 2Q/2009 (Apr-Jun). Also, the patch(es) for this RFE for other S10 updates should be released at the time when S10U7 is out.

I've updated the PKCS#11 patch to the latest OpenSSL 0.9.8i version. The patch includes RFEs and fixes we integrated into OpenSolaris since the last patch release.[Read More]

On Friday Sep 12, I integrated 6445288 ssh needs to be OpenSSL engine aware project which will be released together with Nevada 99. The project was targeted at UltraSPARC T2 platform (AKA Niagara 2) because it provides a hardware acceleration of symmetric encryption algorithms that can be used to speed up applications like SSH. Platforms without any hardware acceleration for symmetric ciphers are uneffected. If you have a Niagara 2 and will use the new code, you will see the difference without changing your configuration. It will work out of box. [Read More]

We already found a bug in recent changes to the PKCS#11 engine. It was quickly fixed and the patch was updated. If your PKCS#11 backend offers just one slot you are not affected. You can download pkcs11_engine-0.9.8h.patch.2008-08-01, and take a look at README shipped as part of the patch. BTW, a check whether the patch is used on Solaris to trigger Solaris specific code was made automatic.