Hardware acceleration using VIA Padlock (was Re: a couple of questions)

Hi there,

I found a page describing how to use the VIA Padlock ACE (AES encryption 
in hardware) on recent Nehemiah processors.

http://www.logix.cz/michal/devel/padlock/#openssl

There's a patch to OpenSSL 0.9.7d that provides access to the Padlock ACE 
through the ENGINE interface.

It also gives instructions on how to enable ENGINE support in applications:

 | Applications using OpenSSL
 |
 | Applications that use OpenSSL library for their cryptographic needs (such 
 | as OpenSSH) must explicitly load the available hardware crypto engines. 
 | This can be done with these simple calls during startup of the program:
 |
 | #include <openssl/engine.h>
 |
 | int main ()
 | {
 |      [...]
 |      /* Init available hardware crypto engines. */
 |      ENGINE_load_builtin_engines();
 |      ENGINE_register_all_complete();
 |      [...]
 | }    

I didn't find any calls to the ENGINE_* functions in the OpenVPN source, 
so I suspect that you'd need to add these two calls somewhere.

It would be nice if somebody who has one of these units could benchmark
its performance with OpenVPN.

--eric

> OpenVPN's interface to the OpenSSL library uses either TLS or the EVP layer
> for low-level crypto.  I know that the EVP layer supports crypto acceleration,
> but I've never actually tested this feature with OpenVPN because I haven't had
> access to a machine with hardware acceleration.
> 
> If you have a version of OpenSSL which is smart enough to allow the user to
> configure it so that all OpenSSL client applications will transparently use
> the accelerator without needing explicit source code changes to do so, then
> the answer is probably yes, OpenVPN will use it transparently.


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