Providing Reliable Services for Hardware Cryptography Accelerator in Virtualization

Abstract

Hardware Cryptography Accelerator has been used as a cost saving solution to provide services for web servers which face high computational consumption from SSL/TLS processing in Cloud Computing. However, services provided by the hardware accelerator can’t be continuous during hardware maintenance phases in virtualized environment. To provide reliable(24*365) services in cloud, we introduce a “Crypto Fallback Architecture for Virtualization” that combines the hypervisor, VM(Virtual Machine) and hardware. Our solution has been deployed successfully on Intel® QuickAssist Technology (QAT) which are used widely by Microsoft, Facebook, Alibaba and so on. The evaluation shows that our solution could provide reliable services for nginx/openssl in the cloud.