Patent ID: 8359466

Claim:
A method of processing a packet of data for either encryption or decryption having a security association (SA) for staged security processing on a network processor, the method comprising: computing an address for the SA based on one or more task parameters, wherein the SA is comprised of one or more regions; fetching the SA corresponding to the task parameters to a local memory; reading an SA prefetch control word (SPCW) from the SA in the local memory, wherein the SPCW identifies the one or more regions and associated stages for the one or more regions; generating one or more stage SPCWs (SSPCWs) from the SPCW; storing each of the SSPCWs in a corresponding SSPCW register; servicing each SSPCW register in accordance with a predefined algorithm, wherein servicing includes: fetching a requested SA region from the local memory, wherein the requested SA region corresponds to a selected SSPCW; and providing the requested SA region to a corresponding stage for the staged security processing of an associated portion of the packet.