What is a security accelerator in a processor?

Question

Iron

In arm processors (those that are in androids) there is such a thing as a security accelerator. As I understand it, this is a cryptographic accelerator. The question is, how does it work? Is it a separate processor or just an ALU that receives a data set as input? Does it contain some kind of encryption algorithm? Does it contain a hardware pseudo-random number generator? How does the application interact with it?

Answer 1

Closer to the ALU, as you described, a data set for the input, another data set for the output.
ASIC capable of executing standard commonly used cryptographic algorithms (AES, random). The processor is universal - it executes command after command, it can do everything. ASIC can only do certain things, but much faster. Algorithms are protected at the level of transistor configuration
How the axis on the phone communicates with it - I don’t know. On a PC, this can be done using the PCI or USB bus with a special driver. I suppose in a phone of the same type, the internal bus to the processor and the system driver