After reading this excellent article about porting a lightweight yet powerful encryption algorithm to the PDP-11:
https://niconiconi.neocities.org/posts/ ... on-pdp-11/
I took on the challenge of porting it to an Oric and comparing the relative performance. In the end, the Oric holds up reasonably well, being about six times slower than the PDP-11. I’ve made the code publicly available on GitHub at:
https://github.com/jacqu/chacha20-6502
This algorithm is remarkable for its simplicity. It is used in systems with limited CPU resources but that require high levels of security. It has been integrated into the Linux kernel and, as far as I know, is still considered perfectly secure to this day.
