AXL300 SSL Card Event Message

[John Campbell-Higgens]

Can anyone give me more information on what the following Event Message means:

"The application has requested an exponentiation command bigger than the AXL300 accelerator card can process. This single request will be processed in software"

I need to get a better idea of what this means, the customer has used other SSL Cards and they don't get any messages like this. We have since converted them to HP AXL300 cards, but the site gets this message.

[Rune J. Winje]

These types of accelerator cards offload the CPU by doing millions of math operations (modular exponentiation) per cryptographic key that often can be a 1024-bit RSA key.

My guess without knowing this card in particular is that some application is requesting/using even larger keys (2048 bit or something like that) and since the card supports max 1024 bit keys (?) the computations will be done by the CPU of the server instead (which will give it a double hit in terms of long crypto key and the accompanying amount of processing needed).

Certainly something to watch out for if more than a few messages like this appear per second since the AXL300 card can process 333 SSL (1024-bit RSA encrypted) connections per second while the same CPU will struggle with 2-3 SSL connections.

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/security/axl300/questionsanswers.html#gen2

Cheers,
Rune