wolfSSL is up and running and tested on Apple’s new A12Z platform, and with the right options it is blazing fast! The key options that we benchmarked include our out of the box defaults vs some key optimizations described below. Some notes to help you decipher these benchmarks:

SP is Single Precision Math. It is a wolfSSL developed math library that is extremely well optimized for ARM environments and cryptographic math calculations. SP ASM is the assembly component of the SP math library. ARMASM is the assembly code functionality provided by ARM. As many of our savvy readers know, we have the best support for ARMv8 cryptography extensions, and they work great! MB/Sec is the number of megabytes of data that you can encrypt or decrypt per second. If you have big files to encrypt/decrypt, then you will really enjoy the power of SP math and the ARMv8 cryptography extensions! This is our first pass of optimizations for these benchmarks. We’ll do more, and we expect that a few more passes of optimizations will yield 20% to 40% more performance on any given cipher.

See below for more details!

Algorithm	Throughput (Default Options, MB/sec, higher is faster)	Throughput (SP + SP ASM + ARM ASM, MB/sec, higher is faster))
RNG	69.21	512.621
AES-128-CBC-enc	228.03	1102.22
AES-128-CBC-dec	255.75	6407.078
AES-256-CBC-enc	171.38	848.61
AES-256-CBC-dec	185.67	4103.814
AES-GCM-128-enc	55.067	1344.808
AES-GCM-128-dec	55.04	729.65
AES-256-GCM-enc	51	1350.216
AES-256-GCM-dec	50.967	708.081
CHACHA	305.358	1284.298
CHA-POLY	256.692	907.553
MD5	405.448	405.685
POLY1305	1616.658	3099.69
SHA	453.143	587.883
SHA-256	151.601	1831.661
HMAC-MD5	405.415	405.678
HMAC-SHA	452.972	576.566
HMAC-SHA256	151.556	1831.624
HMAC-SHA512	302.308	367.16

Algorithm	Throughput (Default Options, ms/op, lower is faster)	Throughput (SP + SP ASM + ARM ASM, ms/op, lower is faster)
RSA 2048 Pub	0.612	0.022
RSA 2048 Priv	6.274	0.722
DH 2048 Key Gen	1.339	0.338
DH 2048 Key Agree	2.008	0.338
ECC 256 Key Gen	2.554	0.022
ECC 256 Key Agree	2.54	0.061
EC-DSA Sign	2.653	0.034
EC-DSA Verify	1.76	0.073

To enable SP + SP ASM + ARM ASM and achieve maximum performance on Apple’s A12Z, pass in the following options to configure: ./configure --host=aarch64-apple-darwin --enable-sp --enable-sp-asm --enable-armasm Note that the host flag is only required if the host is not detected as aarch64 by default. Check config.log after running configure to confirm this.

If you have any questions or run into any issues, contact us at facts@wolfssl.com, or call us at +1 425 245 8247.