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More posts like this please! How about a crypto accelerator on FPGA that's integrated with OpenSSL?
by d00mB0t 1y ago
More posts like this please! How about a crypto accelerator on FPGA that's integrated with OpenSSL?
- 15155 1y agoUnless you're talking about niche algorithms (and even then), the FPGA will get smoked by a CPU for most common tasks one would use OpenSSL for.
- d00mB0t 1y agoYes--obviously modern CPUs have crypto extensions that would be faster than an FPGA,this would be for educational purposes.
- 15155 1y agoEven without the extensions, by the time you've moved the workload to the FPGA and back, the CPU has already completed whatever operation your FPGA was going to complete with OpenSSL. FPGA cryptographic acceleration is about batch task bandwidth, OpenSSL has few places where this is required.
- toast0 1y agoIf you want to do crypto acceleration for TLS, there's two places to do it. Handshake/signature/key agreement, which could maybe work, but hasn't been the bottleneck in a long time, eliptic curve dramatically reduces the work for the server and most clients can do it; but maybe shipping the data around for that is fine. The other part is bulk encryption. CPUs have lots of acceleration for that, but clear text is still faster, so the win is not to ship data to an accelerator and then back to the cpu and then out to the NIC, but to ship to the accelerator and from there to the NIC without touching the CPU or often the accelerator is integrated with the NIC. It works even better if the data never has to touch the CPU.
- 15155 1y agoYes, this is why FPGAs are used as NICs in many situations, but the folks doing this are of course not using OpenSSL.
- d00mB0t 1y agoYou must be great to talk to at parties lol, I guess I shouldn't build a RISC-V CPU because Intel is faster?
- 15155 1y agoYou should definitely build a crypto accelerator - just don't integrate it into OpenSSL (painful codebase to work in, no speed benefit, etc.)