Add a comment to BlockCipher mentionining the usefulness of extending it

to support multiple blocks.

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/src/block/block_cipher.h b/src/block/block_cipher.h
index a5efcfb38..39ae1aab3 100644
--- a/src/block/block_cipher.h
+++ b/src/block/block_cipher.h
@@ -12,6 +12,15 @@ namespace Botan {
 
 /**
 * This class represents a block cipher object.
+*
+* It would be very useful to extend this interface to support the
+* encryption of multiple blocks at a time. This could help
+* performance, wrt cache effects in the software implementations, and
+* could be a big deal when supporting block ciphers implemented as
+* hardware devices. It could be used by implementations of ECB, and
+* more importantly counter mode (which most designs are moving to, due
+* to the parallelism possible in counter mode which is not the case
+* with feedback-based modes like CBC).
 */
 class BOTAN_DLL BlockCipher : public SymmetricAlgorithm
    {