7. NXP DPAA CAAM (DPAA_SEC)

The DPAA_SEC PMD provides poll mode crypto driver support for NXP DPAA CAAM hardware accelerator.

7.1. Architecture

SEC is the SOC’s security engine, which serves as NXP’s latest cryptographic acceleration and offloading hardware. It combines functions previously implemented in separate modules to create a modular and scalable acceleration and assurance engine. It also implements block encryption algorithms, stream cipher algorithms, hashing algorithms, public key algorithms, run-time integrity checking, and a hardware random number generator. SEC performs higher-level cryptographic operations than previous NXP cryptographic accelerators. This provides significant improvement to system level performance.

DPAA_SEC is one of the hardware resource in DPAA Architecture. More information on DPAA Architecture is described in DPAA Overview.

DPAA_SEC PMD is one of DPAA drivers which interacts with QBMAN to create, configure and destroy the device instance using queue pair with CAAM portal.

DPAA_SEC PMD also uses some of the other hardware resources like buffer pools, queues, queue portals to store and to enqueue/dequeue data to the hardware SEC.

7.2. Implementation

SEC provides platform assurance by working with SecMon, which is a companion logic block that tracks the security state of the SOC. SEC is programmed by means of descriptors (not to be confused with frame descriptors (FDs)) that indicate the operations to be performed and link to the message and associated data. SEC incorporates two DMA engines to fetch the descriptors, read the message data, and write the results of the operations. The DMA engine provides a scatter/gather capability so that SEC can read and write data scattered in memory. SEC may be configured by means of software for dynamic changes in byte ordering. The default configuration for this version of SEC is little-endian mode.

7.3. Features

The DPAA PMD has support for:

Cipher algorithms:

  • RTE_CRYPTO_CIPHER_3DES_CBC
  • RTE_CRYPTO_CIPHER_AES128_CBC
  • RTE_CRYPTO_CIPHER_AES192_CBC
  • RTE_CRYPTO_CIPHER_AES256_CBC
  • RTE_CRYPTO_CIPHER_AES128_CTR
  • RTE_CRYPTO_CIPHER_AES192_CTR
  • RTE_CRYPTO_CIPHER_AES256_CTR

Hash algorithms:

  • RTE_CRYPTO_AUTH_SHA1_HMAC
  • RTE_CRYPTO_AUTH_SHA224_HMAC
  • RTE_CRYPTO_AUTH_SHA256_HMAC
  • RTE_CRYPTO_AUTH_SHA384_HMAC
  • RTE_CRYPTO_AUTH_SHA512_HMAC
  • RTE_CRYPTO_AUTH_MD5_HMAC

AEAD algorithms:

  • RTE_CRYPTO_AEAD_AES_GCM

7.4. Supported DPAA SoCs

  • LS1046A/LS1026A
  • LS1043A/LS1023A

7.5. Whitelisting & Blacklisting

For blacklisting a DPAA device, following commands can be used.

<dpdk app> <EAL args> -b "dpaa_bus:dpaa-secX" -- ...
e.g. "dpaa_bus:dpaa-sec0"

or to disable all 4 SEC devices
-b "dpaa_sec:dpaa-sec0"  -b "dpaa_sec:dpaa-sec1" -b "dpaa_sec:dpaa-sec2" -b "dpaa_sec:dpaa-sec3"

7.6. Limitations

  • Hash followed by Cipher mode is not supported
  • Only supports the session-oriented API implementation (session-less APIs are not supported).

7.7. Prerequisites

DPAA_SEC driver has similar pre-requisites as described in DPAA Overview. The following dependencies are not part of DPDK and must be installed separately:

  • NXP Linux SDK

    NXP Linux software development kit (SDK) includes support for the family of QorIQ® ARM-Architecture-based system on chip (SoC) processors and corresponding boards.

    It includes the Linux board support packages (BSPs) for NXP SoCs, a fully operational tool chain, kernel and board specific modules.

    SDK and related information can be obtained from: NXP QorIQ SDK.

  • DPDK Extras Scripts

    DPAA based resources can be configured easily with the help of ready scripts as provided in the DPDK Extras repository.

    DPDK Extras Scripts.

Currently supported by DPDK:

7.8. Pre-Installation Configuration

7.8.1. Config File Options

Basic DPAA config file options are described in DPAA Overview. In addition to those, the following options can be modified in the config file to enable DPAA_SEC PMD.

Please note that enabling debugging options may affect system performance.

  • CONFIG_RTE_LIBRTE_PMD_DPAA_SEC (default n) By default it is only enabled in defconfig_arm64-dpaa-* config. Toggle compilation of the librte_pmd_dpaa_sec driver.

7.9. Installations

To compile the DPAA_SEC PMD for Linux arm64 gcc target, run the following make command:

cd <DPDK-source-directory>
make config T=arm64-dpaa-linuxapp-gcc install

7.10. Enabling logs

For enabling logs, use the following EAL parameter:

./your_crypto_application <EAL args> --log-level=pmd.crypto.dpaa:<level>

Using pmd.crypto.dpaa as log matching criteria, all Crypto PMD logs can be enabled which are lower than logging level.