Kernel TLS and TLS hardware offload
Channel: EuroBSDcon
Date: 2019-10-27

Kernel TLS and TLS hardware offload
TLS (Transport Layer Security) is a widely-deployed network protocol used for providing cryptographically proven security and authentication of TCP sessions. A kernel implementation of TLS will provide access to TLS hardware offload, ability to access unencrypted bytes of data in the kernel, and a reduction in copies to and from userspace by allowing the use of the sendfile(9) system call for TLS encrypted data.

This talk will start from explaining the basics of TLS protocol, using OpenSSL as an example, cover the advantages and motivation for kernel TLS (KTLS) and later will dive in to the implementation.

One of the major advantages of KTLS is the ability to offload TLS symmetric crypto processing to the network device. This talk will cover TLS hardware offload approaches, like TOE and inline TLS acceleration.

We will close with some performance numbers comparing OpenSSL, KTLS and hardware offloaded TLS with data taken from Netflix servers.


Drew Gallatin

Drew started working on FreeBSD at Duke in the 90s, and was one of the people behind the FreeBSD/alpha port. He worked on zero-copy TCP optimizations for FreeBSD and was sending data at over 1Gb/s before gigabit Ethernet was generally available. He spent a decade at Myricom, optimizing their drivers. After a brief hiatus at Google, he landed at Netflix, where he works on optimizing the FreeBSD kernel and network stack for content delivery. He worked on the optimizations to serve unencrypted Netflix traffic at 100Gb/s, and then on more optimizations to send encrypted traffic at 100Gb/s.