TLS acceleration

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) 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 coprocessors able to handle much of the SSL processing.

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