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Does the underlying crypto in WireGuard lend itself to hardware acceleration/implementation in ASICs? If so, when do we expect to see such devices available?
by schoolornot 6y ago
Does the underlying crypto in WireGuard lend itself to hardware acceleration/implementation in ASICs? If so, when do we expect to see such devices available?
- 867-5309 6y agoI believe Wireguard is up to 4x faster than OpenVPN where OpenVPN uses AES-NI. processors with this instruction set is possibly the closest thing to an ASIC for VPN en/decryption, so I dare say Wireguard will neither need nor benefit from a purpose-built instruction set
- api 6y agoAES is as fast or faster than ChaCha if there is hardware acceleration. OpenVPN is slow for other reasons, and honestly the crypto is usually not the bottleneck in most cases unless you are really pushing multiple gigabits or it's a very small CPU.
- throwaway2048 6y agoThis is definitely not true, chacha20 is frequently faster than AES even with AES-NI in use, especially on earlier implementations of the instruction extension.
- api 6y agoI'd like to see some numbers on this. I'm sure there are some chips where it's the case but are we talking small ARM cores or larger desktop and server chips?
- wmf 6y agoI would expect ASIC support no earlier than 2-3 years after the WireGuard RFC is finalized.
- microcolonel 6y agoI'm not aware of any manufacturer who is committed to providing a ChaCha accelerator or ISA extension, but it seems like it would be highly doable. Not sure what the minimum latency of a ChaCha double round is, seems like it'd be a couple hundred picoseconds, unless there's some sort of forwarding trick with the adders/rotations.
- loeg 6y agoSure, there is no reason ASICs cannot do Chapoly. I don't know if we ever will.