Purpose Of AF_ALG
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## Purpose Of AF_ALG

With the presence of numerous user space cryptographic libraries, one may ask why is there a need for the kernel to expose its kernel crypto API to user space. As there are system calls and potentially memory copies needed before a cipher can be invoked, it should be typically slower than user space shared libraries.

There are several reasons for AF_ALG:

- The first and most important item is the access to hardware accelerators and hardware devices whose technical interface can only be accessed from the kernel mode / supervisor state of the processor. Such support cannot be used from user space except through AF_ALG.

- When using user space libraries, all key material and other cryptographic sensitive parameters remains in the calling application's memory even when the application supplied the information to the library. When using AF_ALG, the key material and other sensitive parameters are handed to the kernel. The calling application now can reliably erase that information from its memory and just use the cipher handle to perform the cryptographic operations. If the application is cracked an attacker cannot obtain the key material.

- On memory constrained systems like embedded systems, the additional memory footprint of a user space cryptographic library may be too much. As the kernel requires the kernel crypto API to be present, reusing existing code should reduce the memory footprint.

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