Encryption Acceleration Hardware with Hostap

[Jouni Malinen]

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 10:34:14AM -0300, Douglas Diniz wrote:
> Hi, I have a embedded system with a Freescale mpc8323e processor. I'm
> using Hostap to do the encryption in the Wifi interface (Ubiquiti card
> with Madwifi driver).

I'm not sure what exactly you are describing here.. If you are referring
to hostapd with "Hostap", please note that hostapd does not encrypt or
decrypt data frames; your driver or WLAN hardware does it (in case of
Madwifi, you are likely already using hardware acceleration for data
frame encryption and decryption with CCMP/TKIP/WEP).

> This processor has a Encryption Acceleration hardware, and I want to use this.
> Someone know what I have to do? Do I need to do something in the hostap code?

What exactly do you want to do with this hardware? It would not make
much sense to try to accelerate CCMP/TKIP/WEP since they are already
taken care of in hardware and doing this on an external (to the WLAN
card) component would just slow things down.

I would assume you could try to accelerate some of the authentication
mechanisms, but I would not expect much benefit from there either unless
you are looking into running something like EAP-TLS on the device.

-- 
Jouni Malinen                                            PGP id EFC895FA