Exar Adds Open Source Support for SSL and IPsec

Exar Corporation announced the addition of open source support for SSL and IPsec to their family of security processors and Express DX acceleration cards.

This includes OpenSSL support for SSL and strongSwan and OpenSwan support for IPsec. The addition of these new protocols provides hardware-accelerated security solutions for web, cloud and network applications.

The cloud and the ever increasing number of web-based applications are driving the need for security. As applications and the amount of diverse data are driven into the cloud, they become vulnerable. As a result, various CPU-based software and hardware-accelerated cryptographic techniques are being used to address security concerns.

"Cloud and web based applications consist of multiple workloads with different attributes," said Zack Mihalis, division vice president, DataCom and Storage Business Unit, Exar. "The traditional ‘one size fits all’ approach of simply using more CPU cores to address workload and security requirements is no longer cost effective or efficient. Hardware-accelerated security solutions enable customers to optimize application performance and network bandwidth, as well as reduce overall system power consumption."  

Although general purpose CPUs have gotten significantly faster, encryption, authentication, and public key processing for OpenSSL are computationally intensive and can saturate multiple multi-core CPUs. This issue will be magnified as the market transitions from 1K to 2K public key sizes and more web sites use SSL for security (i.e., HTTPS sites). Exar’s Express DX cards and security processors can off-load these protocols and algorithms and reduce CPU utilization by over 95% enabling optimized workloads, higher system performance and reduced overall power consumption.

The company will demonstrated the benefits of hardware-acceleration for encryption, authentication and public key processing for OpenSSL at Interop NY, October 5 & 6. The demonstration compared Exar’s Express DX 1845 acceleration card versus CPU-based software implementations of compression, encryption, authentication and public key processing. The DX 1845 demonstration will highlight the performance advantages, flexibility, and power savings that Exar’s hardware-accelerated security solutions provide to OEMs building web, cloud and network appliances.

The new security offerings are available in Exar’s 8200 series of security processors and Express DX card families.