A Dedicated Secure Cryptoprocessor For Librems?

Hardware
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I think it may be an interesting idea to introduce to the Librems.

What I mean is, a dedicated processor for hard-drive encryption methods, especially. When a hard drive is encrypted using something like VeraCrypt it slows down the system immensely, I assume because information must constantly be encrypted/decrypted causing a massive slow-down from all the overhead. It’s especially pronounced when using methods like mine which are cascade combinations of AES Twofish Serpent and Camellia.

I think it’d be nice to have a co-processor inside that can take all this work off of the main CPU - kinda like a GPU does for graphics. That way we hopefully avoid this massive slowdown in the event of hard disk encryption.

If TPM already does this then correct me as I really know little about TPM. I simply thought “Man, encrypted drives sure are slow to do anything from… I wonder if there’s such a thing as an Encryption Processing Unit or EPU?” - then I looked it up and got to “Secure Cryptoprocessor”.

In any case, just thought I’d submit the thought.

2 Likes
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Not all librems have TPM. but, all modern cpus have built in crypto processors.

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Is this only Intel or also AMD and ARM having equivelants?

From what point onward did they support this? I doubt my laptop with a Sandy Bridge processor has it.

Does it require any kind of special setup process?

It also looks like they only mentioned AES encryption support. I somehow doubt it’ll work for cascades of different ciphers (like AES + Twofish + Serpent).

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Intel: Sandy Bridge onwards
AMD: FX (desktop) and Ryzen, Jaguar and Puma (laptop)
ARM: for ARMv8-A (which is what the Librem 5 gets) and presumably onwards

I didn’t see anything there about explicit hardware implementation for other encryption methods, so I imagine that they’d need to be done normally.

EDIT: to clarify, this is being done on the main CPU with some dedicated silicon which should be accessible via user-mode instructions. It’s not a separate processor - think of it as like the floating point “coprocessor” which has basically been part of the main CPU since the 486 days.