[rescue] sun des chips

[Walter Belgers]

Hi,

I've been reading about DES chips that apparantly were available for Sun
3/50 and Sun 3/60 systems. My systems do have an empty socket.

Can anybody confirm these rumours? Has anybody seen any of those chips?
(Does anybody have any for sale? :)

Cheers,
Walter.

[l***@moaa.net]

DES for 3 series?
not that I ever recall, but there was an empty socket for a math co-processor chip.
on modern machines, you can get a crypto card for speeding up SSL encryption for web-servers..

Matt

Post by Walter Belgers
Hi,
I've been reading about DES chips that apparantly were available for Sun
3/50 and Sun 3/60 systems. My systems do have an empty socket.
Can anybody confirm these rumours? Has anybody seen any of those chips?
(Does anybody have any for sale? :)
Cheers,
Walter.
--
Walter Belgers
_______________________________________________
rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue

[Per Sandstrom]

Try "man des" and "man 4 des" on a SunOS 4 machine - software support
for an AmZ8068 Data Ciphering Processor (DCP), made by AMD, is
certainly there. This device was only supported on Sun-3, Sun-3x and
Sun-4 systems (the original sun4 architecture).

There is a related and quite entertaining bug report in SunSolve:

"Bug Id: 1107024
Synopsis: man page for des(1) contains humorous but inflamatory
text in RESTRICTIONS.
Description: The man page for des(1) contains the following text
in section RESTRICTIONS

Software encryption is disabled for programs shipped outside
of the U.S. The program will still be able to encrypt files
if one can obtain an encryption chip, legally or otherwise.

While this is intended to be funny, the concern is that the State or
Defence departments may interpret this as an endorsement (or
encouragement) by Sun for users to illegally "obtain an
encryption chip".

FYI: Encryption chips are no longer supported on SparcStations."

I googled to find more evidence, found several questions, but no
traces of real-life experience with these chips. My guess is that
they were never released on the open market, not even in the U.S.
They might have been deployed in Sun systems sold to the U.S.
Government though.

I'll round off with a quote from Steve Melvin in newsgroup comp.arch
15 August 1989:

"Apparently, Sun at one time had intended to sell a data encryption
option for these machines. The encryption chip provided for was the
AMD Am9518 (which implements the official data encryption standard
(DES)). In the 3/50 and 3/60, all that was needed was to plug the chip
in (and move a jumper in the case of the 3/50) but in later
models chips
needed to drive the 9518 (one or two PALs and a buffer) were not
supplied on the motherboard. The idea was apparently dropped and as
far as we know the DES option has never been made available.
It probably
had a lot to do with the Feds (the DES chip is supposedly not
allowed to
be exported from the US). Having the socket enabled by a PAL may have
had something to do with controlling the use of the DES chip."

Isn't it fun with archaeology? Does anyone know more?

Per

[Walter Belgers]

This post might be inappropriate. Click to display it.

[Per Sandstrom]

I'm not sure how interesting this ancient DES chips business is for
most people on the list, but here's a follow-up. Patient readers will
be rewarded with a subversive Easter Egg from 1985.

Post by Walter Belgers
- The Sun 3/xx and Sun 3/xxx can have a hardware DES
encryption/decryption chip. For Sun 3/50 and Sun 3/60, only the chip
is needed. For the Sun 3/xxx more logic ICs are needed.

I had a look in the SunOS 4.0 man page for des(4s) and found
something interesting. Apparently the Sun-2 could also be equipped
with a DES chip. It says:

CONFIG - SUN-2 SYSTEM
des0 at virtual ? csr 0xee1800

The DES chip that AMD produced, AmZ8068 (also known as Am9518), was
validated by NIST already in 1981, so a Sun-2 implementation would
make sense.

Post by Walter Belgers
- It is highly likely that Sun never sold the DES chip as an option
(but you can buy one yourself and put it in your box)

The suspicion that it was never sold seems to be confirmed by the
following quote from a paper written by Peter Danzig and Steve Melvin
back in 1991 ("Microsecond Resolution Timing with Sun Workstations",
available at http://catarina.usc.edu/danzig/usec_tmr.ps.Z).

"The hardware of Sun 3 and 4 workstations supports a data
encryption chip (DES), but the federal government pressured
Sun to eliminate the DES chips from their products. For this
reason the DES chip's IC socket is empty in these workstations."

Now being curious, I went to the Sun 2 Multibus Rev R ROM that Matt
Fredette has posted on his Sun-2/120 emulator page
(http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~fredette/tme/sun2-120-nbsd.html).

% strings sun2-multi-rev-R.bin
<snip>
@(#)version.c 2.8 85/02/19 Copyright (c) 1985 by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Rev R
<snip>
, DES chip
Love your country, but never trust its government.
<snip>

I doubt the line "Love your country, but never trust its government."
is intended to be spit out on the console. It appears someone at Sun
added a subliminal protest against the government to the Sun-2
BootROM code...!

Per

[Lionel Peterson]

Date: 2004/10/28 Thu AM 09:08:00 GMT
Subject: Re: [rescue] sun des chips
I'm not sure how interesting this ancient DES chips business is for
most people on the list, but here's a follow-up. Patient readers will
be rewarded with a subversive Easter Egg from 1985.
Now being curious, I went to the Sun 2 Multibus Rev R ROM that Matt
Fredette has posted on his Sun-2/120 emulator page
(http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~fredette/tme/sun2-120-nbsd.html).
% strings sun2-multi-rev-R.bin
<snip>
@(#)version.c 2.8 85/02/19 Copyright (c) 1985 by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Rev R
<snip>
, DES chip
Love your country, but never trust its government.
<snip>
I doubt the line "Love your country, but never trust its government."
is intended to be spit out on the console. It appears someone at Sun
added a subliminal protest against the government to the Sun-2
BootROM code...!

Neat link - I never knew about that project...