[svlug] Sheevaplug ?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Will Ashford (washford at cs.stanford.edu):

> Symmetric ciphers in general (AES, Blowfish, etc), do not use float
> point arithmetic. Asymmetric ciphers (like our friends RSA and DSA)
> are almost entirely floating point computations. The majority of
> asymmetric crypto is used at SSL (or SSH) session initiation, after
> that symmetric is used. 

That makes sense -- and asymmetric ciphers are well known for being much
more computationally intensive.  And yes, the session ciphers are
invariably symmetric ones.

That leaves hash algorithms, of course, but I guesstimate that they're 
relied on much less often.