Smart ethernet cards

Although the cryptographic framework does not directly take advantage of ethernet cards that support IPsec processing offloading (since they are not general-purpose cryptographic accelerators), we extended the IPsec stack to use them. Unfortunately, at the time of writing this paper, driver support for these cards was not completed and thus we could not measure their performance. The cards of this type we are familiar with are 100Mbps full-duplex, and it seems reasonable (given our results with dedicated cryptographic processors) to assume that they can achieve that performance. Unfortunately, at the time this paper was written, we did not have enough information to write a device driver that could take advantage of such features.