DragonFly On-Line Manual Pages

AESNI(4)              DragonFly Kernel Interfaces Manual              AESNI(4)

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 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 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), padlock(4), random(4), crypto(9)

HISTORY
     The aesni driver first appeared in FreeBSD 9.0.  It was ported to
     DragonFly by Alex Hornung.

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.

DragonFly 5.1                   April 21, 2018                   DragonFly 5.1