Re: Linux CryptoAPI Userspace API proposal

[Herbert Xu <herbert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 01:16:03PM -0700, Loc Ho wrote:
> 
> Linux Crypto User Space Interface Requirement:
> 
> 1. Support crypto and hashing/digest
> 2. Flexible to support compression in the future
> 3. Flexible to support PKA (public key acceleration) in the future

I think extensibility as you've noted is really important.

As the crypto API is really an algorithm API, please make this
interface generic enough so that adding new (potentially non-crypto)
operations is easy.

> 4. A file descriptor per algorithms
> 5. Key and algorithm attributes provided by user space application
> (caller)

I would say that a file descriptor per tfm would make more sense.

> 8. Support cancel a pending operation for user space caller

We don't need to be able to cancel a specific operation.  The
ability to free a tfm and thereby flushing all requests associated
with it should be enough.

> 3. The type of algorithm, key, and other attributes are selected via IO
> control call. This will be a single call.

Being a single call doesn't matter too much here because this is
the slow path.

> 5. Interface for per operation (such as encrypt, decrypt, compress, PKA,
> and hashing)

It might be useful to consider an interface that allowed in-place
operations.

Cheers,
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