hifn(4) - NetBSD Manual Pages

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HIFN(4)                 NetBSD Kernel Interfaces Manual                HIFN(4)


NAME

     hifn -- Hifn 7751/7951/7811/7955/7956 crypto accelerator


SYNOPSIS

     hifn* at pci? dev ? function ?


DESCRIPTION

     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      See http://www.powercrypt.com/.  Comes with 512KB
                           SRAM.

           XL-Crypt        See http://www.powercrypt.com/.  Only board based
                           on 7811 (which is faster than 7751 and has a random
                           number generator).

           NetSec 7751     See http://www.netsec.net/.  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.

     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
     opencrypto(9), and thus for fast_ipsec(4) and crypto(4).

     The Hifn 7951, 7811, 7955, and 7956 may also supply data to the kernel
     rnd(4) subsystem.


SEE ALSO

     crypto(4), fast_ipsec(4), intro(4), rnd(4), opencrypto(9)


HISTORY

     The hifn device driver appeared in OpenBSD 2.7.  The hifn device driver
     was imported to FreeBSD 5.0, back-ported to FreeBSD 4.8, and subsequently
     imported into NetBSD 2.0.


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 use-
     ful.

     Support for the 7955 and 7956 is incomplete; the asymmetric crypto facil-
     ities are to be added and the performance is suboptimal.

     Supplying data to the kernel rnd(4) subsystem has been disabled, pending
     verification that the on-chip RNG is statistically adequate.


BUGS

     The 7751 chip starts out at initialization by only supporting compres-
     sion.  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.

NetBSD 4.0                      October 8, 2003                     NetBSD 4.0