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.