19. SNOW 3G Crypto Poll Mode Driver

The SNOW3G PMD (librte_crypto_snow3g) provides poll mode crypto driver support for utilizing the ARM64 port of Intel IPsec Multi-Buffer library which implements F8 and F9 functions for SNOW 3G UEA2 cipher and UIA2 hash algorithms.

19.1. Features

SNOW 3G PMD has support for:

Cipher algorithm:

  • RTE_CRYPTO_CIPHER_SNOW3G_UEA2

Authentication algorithm:

  • RTE_CRYPTO_AUTH_SNOW3G_UIA2

Note

The latest v1.3 add ARM64 port of ipsec-mb library support ARM platform.

19.2. Limitations

  • Chained mbufs are not supported.

  • SNOW 3G (UIA2) supported only if hash offset field is byte-aligned.

  • In-place bit-level operations for SNOW 3G (UEA2) are not supported (if length and/or offset of data to be ciphered is not byte-aligned).

19.3. SNOW3G PMD vs AESNI MB PMD

On Intel processors this PMD is no longer supported, please use the AESNI MB PMD. Take a look at the PMD documentation (AES-NI Multi Buffer Crypto Poll Mode Driver) for more information.

19.4. Installation

To build DPDK with the SNOW3G_PMD the user is required to download the multi-buffer library and compile it on their user system before building DPDK.

The ARM64 port of the multi-buffer library can be downloaded from https://gitlab.arm.com/arm-reference-solutions/ipsec-mb/-/tree/main/. The latest version of the library supported by this PMD is tagged as SECLIB-IPSEC-2026.05.30.

After downloading the library, the user needs to unpack and compile it on their system before building DPDK:

make
make install

The library requires NASM to be built on x86. Depending on the library version, it might require a minimum NASM version (e.g. v0.54 requires at least NASM 2.14).

NASM is packaged for different OS. However, on some OS the version is too old, so a manual installation is required. In that case, NASM can be downloaded from NASM website. Once it is downloaded, extract it and follow these steps:

./configure
make
make install

As a reference, the following table shows a mapping between the past DPDK versions and the external crypto libraries supported by them:

Table 19.1 DPDK and external crypto library version compatibility

DPDK version

Crypto library version

20.02 - 21.08

Multi-buffer library 0.53 - 1.3

21.11 - 24.07

Multi-buffer library 1.0 - 1.5

24.11+

Multi-buffer library 1.4+

19.5. Initialization

In order to enable this virtual crypto PMD, user must:

  • Build the multi buffer library (explained in Installation section).

To use the PMD in an application, user must:

  • Call rte_vdev_init(“crypto_snow3g”) within the application.

  • Use –vdev=”crypto_snow3g” in the EAL options, which will call rte_vdev_init() internally.

The following parameters (all optional) can be provided in the previous two calls:

  • socket_id: Specify the socket where the memory for the device is going to be allocated (by default, socket_id will be the socket where the core that is creating the PMD is running on).

  • max_nb_queue_pairs: Specify the maximum number of queue pairs in the device (8 by default).

  • max_nb_sessions: Specify the maximum number of sessions that can be created (2048 by default).

Example:

./dpdk-l2fwd-crypto -l 1 --vdev="crypto_snow3g,socket_id=0,max_nb_sessions=128" \
-- -p 1 --cdev SW --chain CIPHER_ONLY --cipher_algo "snow3g-uea2"