Exploring the differences between hardware and software cryptography

In the following sections, we'll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using hardware-based cryptography. The remaining projects in the book will use embedded hardware cryptographic devices, so it's important to know their capabilities and their limitations. Refer to Chapter 1, Creating Your BeagleBone Black Development Environment, for additional resources on cryptography and terms used in this section.

Understanding the advantages of hardware-based cryptography

For the advantages of hardware cryptography, we'll focus on the embedded environment since that is the target use case of BBB. While chip manufacturers may provide a laundry list of advantages, there are two main categories: cryptographic acceleration and key isolation features.

Offloading computation to a separate processor

One advantage of using a dedicated cryptographic co-processor is to offload computation to reduce CPU usage. A typical example is using...