AES-NI
AES-NI is a hardware instruction-set extension on Intel/AMD processors that provides dedicated AES instructions (AESENC, AESKEYGENASSIST, and others), speeding up AES and resisting timing side channels.
Purpose
It accelerates AES with hardware-level instructions (several times faster than software) and eliminates timing-side-channel risks for TLS, VPNs, and full-disk encryption.
Mechanism
Dedicated instructions execute the SubBytes, ShiftRows, MixColumns, and AddRoundKey steps directly, with data residing in XMM registers, avoiding the memory-timing leaks of table-lookup implementations.
Use cases
- TLS connection encryption
- Full-disk encryption (BitLocker, FileVault)
- VPN data channels