Design and implementation of the Linux kernel support for a cryptographic hardware accelerator

Nowadays security is a major concern for the entire computer industry. Our lives are deeply linked with the web: emails, calendar, messages and so on. This is a huge threat for our privacy, because without precautions all these information can be stolen and used against us. Moreover there is a trend, in the recent years, to make every device "smart". This creates other problems, because devices that were considered to be "secure" are no longer secure; Potentially an hacker could remotely turn on or off our home lights, or see what there is inside our fridge. A very important tool against all the aforementioned problems is cryptography; It can be used to protect data in three ways: confidentiality, authenticity and integrity. Ensuring these things can be computationally intensive and because the need of this type of operation is increasing, the need for hardware acceleration is increasing too. The work of this thesis is focused on the cryptographic hardware accelerator, developed at the University of Pisa: how its driver has been designed and implemented and how it performs against some software implementations