In the past, support has been used to pay for hosting costs, development hardware, books on cryptography and C++, and coffee beans. Jack Lloyd's Amazon wishlist contains a list of books related to development, security, and cryptography that would be useful aids in the future development of the library.
Spare development hardware, particularly cryptographic accelerators, that could be donated or lent to developers would be of great use in getting support for that device included. If you happen to have spare hardware, contact Jack or the botan-devel list. Particularly of interest
- A fast graphics card capable of CUDA and/or OpenCL; Jack has machines with NVIDIA 8400GS and 3100m cards, both these have only a couple of processors each. These are OK for initial development and testing, but for optimization a modern NVIDIA card with a sizeable number of stream processors, like the GT 240, could allow for writing high-speed implementations of various primitives that would work on specialized hardware that just happens to already exist in a large number of computers.
- A Macintosh system (PPC or x86) capable of running OS X.
- Soekris's VPN 1401 is a cheap ($75, and lower in bulk) PCI board with a Hifn 7955 crypto chip (drivers for which are included in Linux as of 2.6.27). A Mini-PCI version is also available.
- VIA's C7 processor provides built in random number generation, AES, SHA-1, SHA-256, and Montgomery multiply. All of these operations could easily be used to accelerate Botan (and thus, applications using it) dramatically on this platform.
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Many thanks to everyone who has supported Botan.