1. TLS Accelerator
   1. A method of offloading processor-intensive public-key encryption for Transport Layer Security (TLS) to a hardware accelerator.
2. Installation
   1. A separate card plugs into a computer's peripheral (PCI) slot.
   2. TLS accelerators may use off the shelf CPUs, but most use custom ASICs and RISC chips.
3. Operation
   1. The most computationally expensive part of a TLS session is the TLS handshake:
      1. During the TLS handshake the server and the client establish symmetric session keys.
      2. However, the encryption and signature of the TLS handshake messages uses asymmetric keys, which requires more computational power.
   2. TLS accelerators offload processing of the TLS handshake, while leaving it to the server to process the less intense symmetric cryptography of the TLS data exchange.