I’m thinking about building a box for pfsense. Looking at hardware options and I see a pretty significant difference in price when comparing hardware with and without AES-NI. I don’t necessarily think I’ll need AES. The way I understand it, AES is for using VPN that is somehow running on the router??? I mean, my wife and I both use VPNs on our work computers so we can reach our work networks, but that isn’t using any encryption features on my router, is it?? Or am I not understanding?
why?
The company behind pfSense is shady as hell:
https://opnsense.org/opnsense-com/
Also the complete and utter clusterfuck of an attempt to bring Wireguard into the FreeBSD kernel:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-license-violations-and-bad-code-freebsd-13s-close-call/