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AESNI(4)	       FreeBSD Kernel Interfaces Manual		      AESNI(4)

NAME
     aesni -- driver for the AES and SHA accelerator on	x86 CPUs

SYNOPSIS
     To	compile	this driver into the kernel, place the following lines in your
     kernel configuration file:

	   device crypto
	   device cryptodev
	   device aesni

     Alternatively, to load the	driver as a module at boot time, place the
     following line in loader.conf(5):

	   aesni_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION
     Starting with Intel Westmere and AMD Bulldozer, some x86 processors im-
     plement a new set of instructions called AESNI.  The set of six instruc-
     tions accelerates the calculation of the key schedule for key lengths of
     128, 192, and 256 of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) symmetric ci-
     pher, 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.

     Starting with the Intel Goldmont and AMD Ryzen microarchitectures,	some
     x86 processors implement a	new set	of SHA instructions.  The set of seven
     instructions accelerates the calculation of SHA1 and SHA256 hashes.

     The processor capability is reported as SHA in the	Structured Extended
     Features line at boot.

     The aesni driver does not attach on systems that lack both	CPU capabili-
     ties.  On systems that support only one of	AESNI or SHA extensions, the
     driver will attach	and support that one function.

     The aesni driver registers	itself to accelerate AES and SHA operations
     for crypto(4).  Besides speed, the	advantage of using the aesni driver is
     that the AESNI operation is data-independent, thus	eliminating some at-
     tack 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.  SHA support was added in
     FreeBSD 12.0.

AUTHORS
     The aesni driver was written by Konstantin	Belousov <kib@FreeBSD.org> and
     Conrad Meyer <cem@FreeBSD.org>.  The key schedule calculation code	was
     adopted from the sample provided by Intel and used	in the analogous
     OpenBSD driver.  The hash step intrinsics implementations were supplied
     by	Intel.

FreeBSD	13.0		      September	26, 2017		  FreeBSD 13.0

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | SEE ALSO | HISTORY | AUTHORS

Want to link to this manual page? Use this URL:
<https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=aesni&manpath=FreeBSD+12.0-RELEASE>

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