Reply To: Security

We have not put hardware encryption into the base Mill, because we expect encryption methods to change over the life of the architecture and don’t want to be saddled with outdated legacy requirements.

That said, the Mill has enough horsepower to do a reasonable software crypto. For application that want more, the Mill defines an extension interface to which things like crypto and other specialized engines can be hooked. The interface makes the engine look like an i/o device from the program using it.

We have also considered supporting a physical seed unit. Such units give only a few bits of entropy and so cannot themselves be used for crypto, but the provide an uncrackable seed for regular algorithms. The decision on that has been deferred until after the FPGA version.