Contents
What is cryptographic hardware acceleration?
Cryptographic hardware acceleration is the use of hardware to perform cryptographic operations faster than they can be performed in software. Hardware accelerators are designed for computationally intensive software code.
What is the purpose of a cryptographic accelerator?
In computing, a cryptographic accelerator is a co-processor designed specifically to perform computationally intensive cryptographic operations, doing so far more efficiently than the general-purpose CPU.
Does OpenSSL use hardware acceleration?
To support available hardware extensions, OpenSSL provides so-called EVP crypto APIs (e.g., EVP_Decrypt/EVP_Encrypt) which can automatically leverage hardware acceleration like AES-NI (if available) and fall back to software implementation (if not available), via a single interface.
What is cryptographic security?
Cryptography is the study of secure communications techniques that allow only the sender and intended recipient of a message to view its contents. Here, data is encrypted using a secret key, and then both the encoded message and secret key are sent to the recipient for decryption.
What is cryptographic coprocessor?
A hardware module that includes a processor specialized for encryption and related processing. Such devices are built with numerous protection features that prevent unauthorized retrieval of data as well as from having their circuits reverse engineered.
What is total memory encryption?
Total Memory Encryption (TME) – the capability to encrypt the entirety of physical memory of a system. The architecture is flexible and will support additional memory protection schemes in the future. This capability, when enabled, is intended to support (unmodified) existing system and application software.
Does OpenSSL use AES-NI?
So that conclusion is that AES-NI is used by default for openssl.
What is Af_alg?
When using AF_ALG, the key material and other sensitive parameters are handed to the kernel. The calling application now can reliably erase that information from its memory and just use the cipher handle to perform the cryptographic operations. If the application is cracked an attacker cannot obtain the key material.
When do you need a cryptographic hardware accelerator?
If the server side is some embedded device, with let’s say some 400MHz MIPS CPU, it could benefit highly from some integrated (and supported!) acceleration. You probably want enough performance, that you can use your entire bandwidth. Well, now go and find some benchmark showing you precisely the difference with enabled/disabled acceleration.
How is a cryptographic accelerator integrated into a SoC?
A Cryptographic Hardware Accelerator can be integrated into the soc as a separate processor, as special purpose CPU (aka Core). integrated in a Coprocessor on the circuit board contained on a Chip on an extension circuit board, this can be connected to the mainboard via some BUS, e.g. PCI an ISA extension like e.g.
Where can I find benchmarks for crypto acceleration?
Find benchmarks that show you exactly the performance for this purpose. You won’t be able to extrapolate this information from other benchmarks. think of other practical uses, and find specific benchmarks. If your boards supports hardware crypto acceleration, the respective drivers should already be built into the kernel.
How to identify cryptographic hardware accelerators in OpenWrt?
To identify hardware-drivers, look for drivers with types skcipher and shash, having priority >= 300, but beware that AES-NI and similar CPU instructions will have a high priority as well, and do not need /dev/crypto or AF_ALG to be used!