Facing Extinction: The Fight To Keep Hardware Crypto Engines in Embedded Linux
Talkat Open Source Summit India 2026 · on Wednesday, 2026-06-17· at 18:25· Lotus Ballroom 3 (Level 3)·
summary
Upstream maintainers are removing kernel support for crypto engines after benchmarks show CPU crypto (ARMv8/AVX512) outperforms accelerators by 12–56× performance gap; examples include Intel QAT at ~285 Mbps vs AES-optimized CPU at ~16,000 Mbps, and TI DTHEV2 at ~50–55 Mbps vs ARM AES at ~700 Mbps. Embedded use cases need DPA/EMA side-channel resistance and hardware-backed key isolation for secure boot, certifications, and PQC-era protections, and one accelerator driver is accepted only after proving those hardware countermeasures.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Hardware crypto engines in Linux
- 2:07Upstream removal of crypto support
- 3:31What crypto accelerators are
- 7:05Why accelerators seem slower
- 9:13Embedded use cases for accelerators
- 12:47Maintainers want to purge drivers
- 14:53Embedded threat models
- 17:43Side-channel resistance in hardware
- 19:30Certification for hardware security
- 21:41Upstream crypto drivers status
- 24:10Vendors fail to maintain drivers
- 25:39Q&A: Crypto co-processors
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