10.5 Cryptographic Backend

Today most new processors, either for embedded or desktop systems include either instructions intended to speed up cryptographic operations, or a co-processor with cryptographic capabilities. Taking advantage of those is a challenging task for every cryptographic application or library. Unfortunately the cryptographic library that GnuTLS is based on takes no advantage of these capabilities. For this reason GnuTLS handles this internally by following a layered approach to accessing cryptographic operations as in Figure 10.4.

Figure 10.4: GnuTLS cryptographic back-end design.

The TLS layer uses a cryptographic provider layer, that will in turn either use the default crypto provider – a software crypto library, or use an external crypto provider, if available.

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