Incomputing, acryptographic accelerator is aco-processor designed specifically to perform computationally intensivecryptographic operations, doing so far more efficiently than the general-purposeCPU. Because manyservers' system loads consist mostly of cryptographic operations, this can greatly increase performance.
Intel'sAES-NI is by far the most common cryptographic accelerator in commodity hardware.VIA PadLock is another recent example.
Several operating systems provide some support for cryptographic hardware. TheBSD family of systems has theOpenBSD Cryptographic Framework (OCF),Linux systems have theCrypto API,Solaris OS has the Solaris Cryptographic Framework (SCF) andMicrosoft Windows has theMicrosoft CryptoAPI.
Some cryptographic accelerators offer newmachine instructions and can therefore be used directly by programs. Libraries such asOpenSSL andLibreSSL support some such cryptographic accelerators.
Almost allUnix-like operating systems useOpenSSL or the forkLibreSSL as their cryptography library. These libraries use cryptographic accelerators such asAES-NI if available.[1]