NAME
aesni —
driver for the AES accelerator on Intel
CPUs
SYNOPSIS
To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your kernel configuration file:
device crypto
device cryptodev
device aesniAlternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following line in loader.conf(5):
aesni_load="YES"
DESCRIPTION
Starting with some models of Core i5/i7, Intel processors implement a new set of instructions called AESNI. The set of six instructions accelerates the calculation of the key schedule for key lengths of 128, 192, and 256 of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) symmetric cipher, and provides a hardware implementation of the regular and the last encryption and decryption rounds.The processor capability is reported as AESNI in the Features2
line at boot. The aesni driver does not attach on
systems that lack the required CPU capability.
The aesni driver registers itself to
accelerate AES operations for
crypto(4). Besides speed, the advantage of using the
aesni driver is that the AESNI operation is
data-independent, thus eliminating some attack vectors based on measuring
cache use and timings typically present in table-driven implementations.
SEE ALSO
crypt(3), crypto(4), intro(4), ipsec(4), padlock(4), random(4), crypto(9)
HISTORY
The aesni driver first appeared in
FreeBSD 9.0.
AUTHORS
The aesni driver was written by
Konstantin Belousov
<kib@FreeBSD.org>. The
key schedule calculation code was adopted from the sample provided by Intel
and used in the analogous OpenBSD driver.