Editing TLS acceleration (section)

{{Short description|Method to accelerate Transport Layer Security}}
[[Image:Sun-crypto-accelerator-1000.jpg|thumb|Sun Microsystems SSL accelerator PCI card introduced in 2002]]{{More citations needed|date=July 2023}}
'''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)<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Stewart |first1=J. Michael |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=K1cBEAAAQBAJ&dq=%22tls+acceleration%22&pg=PA315 |title=Network Security, Firewalls, and VPNs |last2=Kinsey |first2=Denise |date=2020-10-15 |publisher=Jones & Bartlett Learning |isbn=978-1-284-23004-8 |language=en}}</ref> 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 [[coprocessor]]s able to handle much of the SSL processing.

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