TLS acceleration

Sun Microsystems SSL accelerator PCI card introduced in 2002

TLS acceleration (formerly known as SSL acceleration) is a method of offloading processor-intensive public-key encryption for Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its predecessor Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)^[1] to a hardware accelerator.

Typically this means having a separate card that plugs into a PCI slot in a computer that contains one or more coprocessors able to handle much of the SSL processing.

TLS accelerators may use off-the-shelf CPUs, but most use custom ASIC and RISC chips to do most of the difficult computational work.

^ Stewart, J. Michael; Kinsey, Denise (2020-10-15). Network Security, Firewalls, and VPNs. Jones & Bartlett Learning. ISBN 978-1-284-23004-8.

[1] Stewart, J. Michael; Kinsey, Denise (2020-10-15). Network Security, Firewalls, and VPNs. Jones & Bartlett Learning. ISBN 978-1-284-23004-8.

[1]