The framework enables providers of cryptographic services to have their services used by many

consumers in the Oracle Solaris operating system. Another name for providers is plugins. The

framework allows three types of plugins:

* User-level plugins - Shared objects that provide services by using PKCS #11 libraries, such as

pkcs11_softtoken.so.1.

* Kernel-level plugins - Kernel modules that provide implementations of cryptographic algorithms in

software, such as AES.

Many of the algorithms in the framework are optimized for x86 with the SSE2 instruction set and for

SPARC hardware.

* Hardware plugins - Device drivers and their associated hardware accelerators. The Niagara chips,

the ncp and n2cp device drivers, are one example. A hardware accelerator offloads expensive

cryptographic functions from the operating system. The Sun Crypto Accelerator 6000 board is one

example.

Reference: Oracle Solaris Cryptographic Framework

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19963-01/html/821-1456/scf-10.html