12.6 Cryptographic Backend

Several new systems provide hardware assisted cryptographic algorithm implementations that offer implementations some orders of magnitude faster than the software. For this reason GnuTLS supports by default the /dev/crypto device usually found in FreeBSD and OpenBSD system, to take advantage of installed hardware.

In addition it is possible to override parts of the crypto backend or the whole. It is possible to override them both at runtime and compile time, however here we will discuss the runtime possibility. The API available for this functionality is in gnutls/crypto.h header file.