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.conf(5):

             hifn_load="YES"

DESCRIPTION

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

       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 ipsec(4) and crypto(4).

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

HARDWARE

       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      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 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.

SEE ALSO

       crypt(3), crypto(4), intro(4), ipsec(4), random(4), crypto(9)

HISTORY

       The hifn device driver appeared in OpenBSD 2.7.  The hifn device driver was imported to FreeBSD 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.

Debian                                          October 19, 2009                                         HIFN(4)