Axis ARTPEC-6 and ARTPEC-7 crypto engines
Hardware cryptography accelerator built into Axis Communications' ARTPEC-6 and ARTPEC-7 system-on-chip designs, which power the company's network surveillance cameras from roughly the late 2010s onward. It offloads symmetric ciphers and hashing for the embedded Linux firmware running on those cameras.
recommendation
Worth keeping but documenting as a narrow vendor-specific driver, because it only binds to Axis's own ARTPEC-6/7 camera SoCs and has no generic replacement. Upstream activity is healthy, with cleanup and fix patches still landing on the linux-crypto list as recently as 2026, and Axis still sells ARTPEC-7-based cameras new, so the hardware remains in production even though deployments outside Axis's surveillance product line are essentially nil.
repository signals
sources
- lore.kernel.org
The driver is still seeing upstream maintenance in 2026, with a linux-crypto patch touching artpec6_crypto.c.
- axis.com
Axis still had a current product page with part numbers for a camera built on ARTPEC 7, indicating hardware in this family was still sold new around 2025/2026.
- axis.com
Axis describes ARTPEC-7 as a predecessor to ARTPEC-8/9, showing the family is vendor-specific embedded camera silicon rather than a broad commodity platform.
- git.kernel.org
The driver binds only to axis,artpec6-crypto and axis,artpec7-crypto device-tree compatibles, so there is no obvious generic upstream replacement driver.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Local file inspection via exec_command showed this is a real platform crypto driver for Axis ARTPEC6/7 only. lore_file_timeline on drivers/crypto/axis/artpec6_crypto.c showed steady 2022-2026 activity with recent cleanup/fix patches and no visible removal/deprecation series in the returned history, so removal is not indicated. web search found a live Axis product page for an ARTPEC-7 camera and the Axis SoC overview page, which together suggest the hardware family is still sold but in a narrow embedded-surveillance niche. The kernel.org source URL is canonical recall; claim was verified against the locally inspected file. Net: keep upstream, but annotate as niche/vendor-specific rather than broadly deployed.