7. NXP DPAA2 CAAM (DPAA2_SEC)

The DPAA2_SEC PMD provides poll mode crypto driver support for NXP DPAA2 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.

DPAA2_SEC is one of the hardware resource in DPAA2 Architecture. More information on DPAA2 Architecture is described in DPAA2 Overview.

DPAA2_SEC PMD is one of DPAA2 drivers which interacts with Management Complex (MC) portal to access the hardware object - DPSECI. The MC provides access to create, discover, connect, configure and destroy dpseci objects in DPAA2_SEC PMD.

DPAA2_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.

DPSECI objects are detected by PMD using a resource container called DPRC (like in DPAA2 Overview).

For example:

DPRC.1 (bus)
  |
  +--+--------+-------+-------+-------+---------+
     |        |       |       |       |         |
   DPMCP.1  DPIO.1  DPBP.1  DPNI.1  DPMAC.1  DPSECI.1
   DPMCP.2  DPIO.2          DPNI.2  DPMAC.2  DPSECI.2
   DPMCP.3

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.

A block diagram similar to dpaa2 NIC is shown below to show where DPAA2_SEC fits in the DPAA2 Bus model

                                   +----------------+
                                   | DPDK DPAA2_SEC |
                                   |     PMD        |
                                   +----------------+       +------------+
                                   |  MC SEC object |.......|  Mempool   |
                . . . . . . . . .  |   (DPSECI)     |       |  (DPBP)    |
               .                   +---+---+--------+       +-----+------+
              .                        ^   |                      .
             .                         |   |<enqueue,             .
            .                          |   | dequeue>             .
           .                           |   |                      .
          .                        +---+---V----+                 .
         .      . . . . . . . . . .| DPIO driver|                 .
        .      .                   |  (DPIO)    |                 .
       .      .                    +-----+------+                 .
      .      .                     |  QBMAN     |                 .
     .      .                      |  Driver    |                 .
+----+------+-------+              +-----+----- |                 .
|   dpaa2 bus       |                    |                        .
|   VFIO fslmc-bus  |....................|.........................
|                   |                    |
|     /bus/fslmc    |                    |
+-------------------+                    |
                                         |
========================== HARDWARE =====|=======================
                                       DPIO
                                         |
                                       DPSECI---DPBP
=========================================|========================

7.3. Features

The DPAA2_SEC 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 DPAA2 SoCs

  • LS2160A
  • LS2084A/LS2044A
  • LS2088A/LS2048A
  • LS1088A/LS1048A

7.5. Whitelisting & Blacklisting

For blacklisting a DPAA2 SEC device, following commands can be used.

<dpdk app> <EAL args> -b "fslmc:dpseci.x" -- ...

Where x is the device object id as configured in resource container.

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

DPAA2_SEC driver has similar pre-requisites as described in DPAA2 Overview. The following dependencies are not part of DPDK and must be installed separately:

See NXP QorIQ DPAA2 Board Support Package for setup information

Currently supported by DPDK:

  • NXP SDK 19.09+.
  • MC Firmware version 10.18.0 and higher.
  • Supported architectures: arm64 LE.
  • Follow the DPDK Getting Started Guide for Linux to setup the basic DPDK environment.

7.8. Pre-Installation Configuration

7.8.1. Config File Options

Basic DPAA2 config file options are described in DPAA2 Overview. In addition to those, the following options can be modified in the config file to enable DPAA2_SEC PMD.

Please note that enabling debugging options may affect system performance.

  • CONFIG_RTE_LIBRTE_PMD_DPAA2_SEC (default n) By default it is only enabled in defconfig_arm64-dpaa-* config. Toggle compilation of the librte_pmd_dpaa2_sec driver.

7.9. Installations

To compile the DPAA2_SEC PMD for Linux arm64 gcc target, run the following make command:

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

7.10. Enabling logs

For enabling logs, use the following EAL parameter:

./your_crypto_application <EAL args> --log-level=pmd.crypto.dpaa2:<level>

Using crypto.dpaa2 as log matching criteria, all Crypto PMD logs can be enabled which are lower than logging level.