Running up to 200 operations per second and processing a 1024-bit transaction in less than 5 milliseconds, the Sun Crypto Accelerator improves server response times and increases the number of clients the server can support simultaneously. It creates a secure session with server authentication between two computers that need to interact, and it encrypts data during that session. Server responds with its certificate. Client authenticates server by validating the server's certificate. Client extracts server's public key from certificate and uses it to generate an encrypted response containing a client secret value.
Server decrypts the client's response using the server's private key.
This would be a slow operation in software, but Sun's Crypto Accelerator 1 board completes it in 5 milliseconds, and offloads, the task from the main processor. Both client and server now know the client secret value. They use it to generate session keys used for the encrypted data exchange. Today's Internet servers process millions of transactions daily, which can lead to bottlenecks and constant delays in completing transactions, or dropping the network connection altogether. As online retailers know, lost time translates into lost revenue.