ENGINE ====== With OpenSSL 0.9.6, a new component has been added to support external crypto devices, for example accelerator cards. The component is called ENGINE, and has still a pretty experimental status and almost no documentation. It's designed to be faily easily extensible by the calling programs. There's currently built-in support for the following crypto devices: o CryptoSwift o Compaq Atalla o nCipher CHIL o Nuron A number of things are still needed and are being worked on: o A better way of handling the methods that are handled by the engines. o Documentation! What already exists is fairly stable as far as it has been tested, but the test base has been a bit small most of the time. No external crypto device is chosen unless you say so. You have actively tell the openssl utility commands to use it through a new command line switch called "-engine". And if you want to use the ENGINE library to do something similar, you must also explicitely choose an external crypto device, or the built-in crypto routines will be used, just as in the default OpenSSL distribution. PROBLEMS ======== It seems like the ENGINE part doesn't work too well with Cryptoswift on Win32. A quick test done right before the release showed that trying "openssl speed -engine cswift" generated errors. If the DSO gets enabled, an attempt is made to write at memory address 0x00000002.