Ask, and you shall receive... just got an announcement from Innovation on
their forthcoming encryption software.
Find it here... http://www.innovationdp.com/products/fdrcrypt/
I got it too. Now perhaps I can get the DR PHBs off my back
about this. :-) Ever since that darn artical a month or so ago...
The only issue I see is that at least this initial release doesn't
support hardware acceleration via ICSF. We already use it at the
shop and at DR.
With all the recent news about backup tape loss, backup encryption has
become Topic A. We used to get a couple of inquiries a year about
encryption, now it is many calls a day!!
So we have been working on FDRCRYPT for some time, and the work has
progressed far enough to announce it (you never get vaporware from
Innovation <gr>).
On the hardware issue, you will notice in the announcement that the only
encryption standard we support is AES (Advanced Encryption Standard).
There is no hardware accelerator for AES. Although IBM's ICSF product
has supported AES since z/OS 1.3, it is implemented entirely in
software. We opted to do our own software implementation, so that it
will be independent of MVS releases, and also because we believe that we
can implement it more efficiently than IBM. If IBM someday comes out
with an AES hardware feature, we will evaluate its performance (even
hardware accelerators take CPU time).
We also support several simple encryption techniques which are lower
overhead than AES.
You might wonder why we don't support DES (which is supported by the
hardware accelerators). AES was created as a new standard in 2000
because DES had become more susceptible to cracking by today's
high-speed processors. In fact, DES was recently de-certified by the
Dept of Commerce as a US government option in favor of AES (even TDES,
triple DES, is discouraged). We decided not to put our effort into
supporting a fading standard.
You can read about this at
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/05-9945-DES-Withdrawl.pdf
--
Bruce A. Black
Senior Software Developer for FDR
Innovation Data Processing 973-890-7300
personal: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
sales info: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
tech support: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
web: www.innovationdp.fdr.com
--
Bruce A. Black
Senior Software Developer for FDR
Innovation Data Processing 973-890-7300
personal: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
sales info: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
tech support: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
web: www.innovationdp.fdr.com
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