Re: ARM 64?

On Mon, 2018-06-18 at 09:40 +1000, Mathew McBride wrote:

Hi Peter, There are two crypto options on our board:

• ARMv8 Cryptography instructions (similar to AES-NI on x86)
• Freescale SEC/CAAM engine (a 'hardware accelerator' that can do many

TLS,IPSec etc. operations) I am certain that an RNG is part of the SEC engine, but I need to check the driver status on Linux.

/proc/crypto output for those interested: https://gist.github.com/mcbridematt/11f14c78ed4e35e97adf2f027010e374

Wow, that is a very extensive list of supported ciphers and hashes as well as the combination of HMAC + cipher mode.

IPsec in the kernel will basically be not consuming any CPU cycles for crypto.

Best, -Michael

Regards, Mathew

On 15/6/18, 3:09 am, "Peter Müller" peter.mueller@link38.eu wrote:

Hello,

this board sounds very interesting indeed (trustworthy hardware - yay!).
However, after reading the datasheet it did not became clear to me if it
has some built-in random number generator and/or cryptography

acceleration.

Apart from some low-level backdoors (baked into USB, ... firmware chips)
it seems like this is suitable for security relevant devices. Looking
forward to hear some experiences with IPFire on it. :-)

Best regards,
Peter Müller

> Hey Matt,
> 
> On Mon, 2018-05-28 at 20:32 +1000, Mathew McBride wrote:
>> Hi Michael,
>>
>> Just in response to your questions:
>> On 25/5/18, 11:10 pm, "Michael Tremer" <michael.tremer@ipfire.org>

wrote: >> >> >> I think you hardware is good enough for a builder. But I still am not sure >> what >> to expect from the CPU. It will be faster than a Raspberry Pi, but not a >> Mustang. >> >> We did some benchmarks with the Phoronix test suite a while ago, this will >> give you an idea: >> http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1708303-TR- >> 1703199RI93&obr_hgv=Traverse+LS1043+Prototype > > I had a look at that. And yes indeed, it is a bit hard to figure out the > performance by the CPU name alone for most ARM SoCs. There is no branding in > order of performance (or similar) like Intel has. > > That might actually turn out to be a bigger marketing problem, but we will see > that in the future. > >> To give an idea of the Cortex (ARM designed)-based core performance: >> >> The LS1043 has the same A53 cores as the RPi3, but performs better due to >> having more cache, DDR4 etc (and higher clock). > > Performance is also coming from the rest of the periphery. The RPi has a slow > and not very stable USB bus to talk to the network to and SD card storage. Even > with a faster CPU it might very often just wait for data. > > We have been trying to tell people that they should look out for some specific > features like cache and good single-core performance. > >> A72 is about double A53 in performance (and power consumption!) per MHz, as >> A72 is a modern out-of-order speculative core (it did get hit with the >> Meltdown/Spectre issue). > > Yes, wouldn't mind to have some systems based on that one since the A53 will be > too slow for really large enterprise deployments. > >> The latest gen of ARM64 server cores would all be well above A72, your Mustang >> is probably around the A72 level. >> >> In general, ARM network SoCs try to work 'smarter' instead of 'harder', so the >> high network performance comes from having very good network silicon, taking >> advantage of crypto accelerators etc. > > I prefer the NICs in the SoC which gives great performance. The disadvantage > only is that they sometimes to odd configurations like 5x 1G and 1x 10G in this > case which I don't really understand. The only use-case that makes sense to me > is a server but for that the CPU is too slow and people would probably go for a > A72-class CPU. > >> > There is a TrustZone firmware running in the ring/EL above the OS, for >> the NXP >> > Layerscape/QorIQ SoC's this firmware is open source, and not strictly >> required >> > to run the system (it gets loaded by u-boot after power on). >> >> What does the firmware do? >> It implements some vendor-specific power-management extensions (PSCI), as well >> as some TPM-like functions. >> NXP provides a good overview: https://github.com/qoriq-open-source/ppa- generic >> /blob/integration/ReleaseNotes.txt >> I am not a security expert, but it could be a good test environment for secure >> boot, private key storage and other things. > > Great that this is entirely open. > > -Michael > >> >> >> Cheers, >> Matt >> >> >>

-- 
"We don't care.  We don't have to.  We're the Phone Company."