Performance Analysis of Offloading IPsec Processing to Hardware Based Accelerators

Need for Data security over the IP network is raising day by day. One of the security options i.e. IPSec provides security protocols including cipher and authentication to secure network traffic. Algorithms being used in these protocols are highly CPU intensive. Network equipment providers integrate special cryptographic accelerators in SoCs to offload the IPSec processing from CPU. Various level of hardware support is available for IPSec protocol offload, ranging from independent cipher and authentication processing to handling IPSec protocol features in the hardware. This paper covers the comparative analysis of various hardware offload options. The analysis is supported by IPSec protocol offload based implementation and associated test results on one of the Freescale's QorIQ platforms.