Hardware support for encryption hinting?

rcfa · May 12, 2019, 4:23 AM

So, finally I have a test platform with AES-NI support. Great.
Now, when selecting anything that uses some sort of encryption, how do I know that I chose options that are accelerated in hardware? Or does everything become accelerated once a CPU with the required instruction set is present?
If not, it would be really useful, if the there were an indication as to what can/will use hardware acceleration, and what doesn't.

rcfa · May 31, 2019, 5:20 AM

Bump...

Anyone knows this? Is this somewhere in the doc? Maybe I'm blind, but I can't find that.

kiokoman · May 31, 2019, 7:41 AM

? if you want to know where the option is, i think it's here System ->Advanced ->Miscellaneous -> Cryptographic Hardware, to check if it's loaded you can open a shell and with kldstat you shuld see
aesni.ko loaded
If AES-NI presence is detected it will be used automatecally by OpenSSL and OpenSSL is used by OpenVPN offloading the CPU from cryptographic tasks

You can also do a speed test with and without the module to see the difference with

openssl speed -evp aes-256-gcm

rcfa · May 31, 2019, 6:46 PM

This post is deleted!

rcfa · May 31, 2019, 6:47 PM

@kiokoman Thanks, but you misunderstood me, obviously I didn’t express myself well.

I know the crypto instructions are used. What I don’t know, which settings use them?

e.g. IPSec offers different hashes (md5, sha1-512, ARS-XCBC), different encryption algorithms (AES, AES-GCM, Blowfish, 3DES, CAST).

Are all of these choices accelerated, or only some?
If only some, which ones? All AES? AES-GCM?
What PFS settings are/aren’t covered?

kiokoman · May 31, 2019, 8:30 PM

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/white-paper/advanced-encryption-standard-new-instructions-set-paper.pdf
i think all aes
i don't think it work for md5/sha as it is an hashing algorithm and not an encryption algo
maybe someone else know more about it

JeGr · Jun 3, 2019, 1:57 PM

@rcfa said in Hardware support for encryption hinting?:

I know the crypto instructions are used. What I don’t know, which settings use them?

Go to System>Advanced>Miscellaneous and setup AES-NI to use for crypto. If you do, check your dashboard.
It should tell you sth like:

AES-NI CPU Crypto: Yes (active)

Directly below is (e.g.):

AES-CBC,AES-XTS,AES-GCM,AES-ICM

There you go. Those are to be accelerated if you choose them. Also one could generally say that if you can use AES-GCM, use it! But sadly many other "big firewall vendors" still doesn't support it in 2019 on brand new devices...

rcfa · Jun 3, 2019, 2:34 PM

@JeGr Thanks!