NAME¶
hifn
—
Hifn 7751/7951/7811/7955/7956 crypto
accelerator
SYNOPSIS¶
To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your kernel
configuration file:
device crypto
device cryptodev
device hifn
Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the following
line in
loader.conf(5):
DESCRIPTION¶
The
hifn
driver supports various cards
containing the Hifn 7751, 7951, 7811, 7955, and 7956 chipsets.
The
hifn
driver registers itself to
accelerate DES, Triple-DES, AES (7955 and 7956 only), ARC4, MD5, MD5-HMAC,
SHA1, and SHA1-HMAC operations for
ipsec(4) and
crypto(4).
The Hifn 7951, 7811, 7955, and 7956 will also supply data to the kernel
random(4) subsystem.
HARDWARE¶
The
hifn
driver supports various cards
containing the Hifn 7751, 7951, 7811, 7955, and 7956 chipsets, such as:
- Invertex AEON
- No longer being made. Came as 128KB SRAM model, or 2MB DRAM model.
- Hifn 7751
- Reference board with 512KB SRAM.
- PowerCrypt
- Comes with 512KB SRAM.
- XL-Crypt
- Only board based on 7811 (which is faster than 7751 and has a random
number generator).
- NetSec 7751
- Supports the most IPsec sessions, with 1MB SRAM.
- Soekris Engineering vpn1201 and vpn1211
- See http://www.soekris.com/. Contains a
7951 and supports symmetric and random number operations.
- Soekris Engineering vpn1401 and vpn1411
- See http://www.soekris.com/. Contains a
7955 and supports symmetric and random number operations.
SEE ALSO¶
crypt(3),
crypto(4),
intro(4),
ipsec(4),
random(4),
crypto(9)
HISTORY¶
The
hifn
device driver appeared in
OpenBSD 2.7. The
hifn
device driver was imported to
FreeBSD 5.0.
CAVEATS¶
The Hifn 9751 shares the same PCI ID. This chip is basically a 7751, but with
the cryptographic functions missing. Instead, the 9751 is only capable of
doing compression. Since we do not currently attempt to use any of these chips
to do compression, the 9751-based cards are not useful.
Support for the 7955 and 7956 is incomplete; the asymmetric crypto facilities
are to be added and the performance is suboptimal.
BUGS¶
The 7751 chip starts out at initialization by only supporting compression. A
proprietary algorithm, which has been reverse engineered, is required to
unlock the cryptographic functionality of the chip. It is possible for vendors
to make boards which have a lock ID not known to the driver, but all vendors
currently just use the obvious ID which is 13 bytes of 0.