SSL 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. 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 ASICs and RISC chips to do most of the difficult computational work.