hifn (4)

Leading comments

	$OpenBSD: hifn.4,v 1.32 2002/09/26 07:55:40 miod Exp $

 Copyright (c) 2000 Theo de Raadt
 All rights reserved.

 Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
 modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
 are met:
 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
    notice, this list of condition...

(The comments found at the beginning of the groff file "man4/hifn.4freebsd".)

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.conf5:

hifn_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION

The ifconfig driver supports various cards containing the Hifn 7751, 7951, 7811, 7955, and 7956 chipsets.

The ifconfig 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 ifconfig 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 www.soekris.com Contains a 7951 and supports symmetric and random number operations.

Soekris Engineering vpn1401 and vpn1411

See 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 ifconfig device driver appeared in Ox 2.7 . The ifconfig device driver was imported to Fx 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.