Performance Features & Benefits

Cryptographic Acceleration

As a dedicated subsystem connected externally to the host computer through a TCP/IP over Ethernet interface, ProtectServer External eases the cryptographic processing load of the host system.

Specialized cryptographic electronics, including a dedicated data cipher processor (DCP), memory, and a true random number generator, performs rapid security-sensitive processing and provides storage of confidential keys. Additionally, system performance can be scaled further to meet future transaction performance requirements by optimizing multiple ProtectServer External HSMs utilizing their Workload Distribution functionality.

Broad range of Performance Levels

With regard to the General Purpose APIs available from SafeNet Inc., a number of performance configurations are available:

ProtectToolkit C/J/M/OpenSSL integration

• PL50 ~ 50 RSA signatures (1024-bit) operations/sec
• PL220 ~ 220 RSA signatures (1024-bit) operations/sec
• PL450 ~ 450 RSA signatures (1024-bit) operations/sec

Dual LAN Support

An optional dual network interface variant of ProtectServer External enables the HSM to be integrated on the same or different subnets and to be shared between different networks to protect multiple business domains or provide redundancy within a single network. Likewise, dual LAN support can be utilized to enforce strict separation between administration and cryptographic processing on the HSM.

Multiple Adapter Scalability and Workload Distribution (WLD)

High levels of scalability availability, reliability and increased throughput can be easily achieved by ensuring there is no restriction on the number of HSMs that can work in unison or the number of keys that can be managed. In addition, the application can be relieved from its own load sharing processing to focus on its primary tasks by enabling the built-in configurable WLD mode supplied with the ProtectServer External product.

Multi threading

SafeNet’s Cryptographic API’s are fully thread safe allowing the use of multi-threaded applications to achieve greater throughput.