Good evening everybody,

I'm glad to announce this just in time for Christmas: We now have secure
TLS connections by default! Please see

  http://hg.viff.dk/viff/rev/3891e48de5ac

for the details.

I'm using the GnuTLS library from

  http://www.gnu.org/software/gnutls/

and the matching Python bindings from

  http://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-gnutls

Installing them is fairly streight-forward on the three Linux systems
I've tried it on (Debian 3.1, Ubuntu 7.04, and Fedora Core 6) but I
think we'll eventually have to write a bit about it somewhere.

My initial benchmarks shows that VIFF is just as fast with TLS as
without! I was expecting some sort of performance drop, so this is a
pleasent surprice 

I'll have to do more test to see if this is really true... Running VIFF
between three computers in Denmark (at DAIMI), Norway (where Tord given
me access, thanks!) and USA (viff.dk is hosted in Los Angeles) has given
me these numbers:

  +-----------------+--------------+
  | Number of muls  | Time per mul |
  +-----------------+--------------+
  | 100             | 16.6 ms      |
  +-----------------+--------------+
  | 500             |  6.8 ms      |
  +-----------------+--------------+
  | 1000            |  4.0 ms      |
  +-----------------+--------------+
  | 3000            |  2.9 ms      |
  +-----------------+--------------+

I think the time per multiplication drops rapidly to about 2-3 ms
because of some start-up overhead. This is with the standard 65 bit
prime, I have not yet tried with larger field sizes.

Merry Christmas to you all!

-- 
Martin Geisler