AES-NI

origin: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/download-the-intel-aesni-sample-library

Introduction

AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) is an encryption standard adopted by the U.S. government starting in 2001. It is widely used across the software ecosystem to protect network traffic, personal data, and corporate IT infrastructure. AES is a symmetric block cipher that encrypts/decrypts data through several rounds. The new 2010 Intel® Core™ processor family (code name Westmere) includes a set of new instructions, Intel® Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) New Instructions (AES-NI). The instructions were designed to implement some of the complex and performance intensive steps of the AES algorithm using hardware and thus accelerating the execution of the AES algorithms. AES-NI can be used to accelerate the performance of an implementation of AES by 3 to 10x over a completely software implementation. 

The AES algorithm works by encrypting a fixed block size of 128 bits of plain text in several rounds to produce the final encrypted cipher text. The number of rounds (10, 12, or 14) used depends on the key length (128b, 192b, or 256b). Each round performs a sequence of steps on the input state, which is then fed into the following round. Each round is encrypted using a subkey that is generated using a key schedule. For more details on AES please refer to [1].