Hardware Feature Objects

Hardware feature objects (CKO_HW_FEATURE) represent features of the device. They are created by the firmware on boot-up. The following figure illustrates the hierarchy of hardware feature objects and the attributes they support:

Figure 1: Hardware Feature Object Attribute Hierarchy

Hardware feature objects act as an interface to a hardware feature, existing independent of the feature being represented. For example, creating two clock objects does not imply that there are two clocks, just two interfaces to the one clock. Further, deleting the clock object does not affect the clock device in any way. However hardware feature objects may contain information independent of the feature being represented, which may affect the behavior of the object. The slot in which the object is created and the state of the session may also affect the behavior of the object.

Table 2: Hardware Feature Common Attributes

Attribute

Data Type

Meaning

CKA_HW_FEATURE_TYPE CK_HW_FEATURE

Hardware feature (type)

SafeNet ProtectToolkit-C supports the following values for CKA_HW_FEATURE_TYPE:

>CKH_CLOCK

>CKH_MONOTONIC_COUNTER

>CKH_VD_USER