G.hn is a standard for home networking over power, coaxial, or telephone cable, or a combination of the three. The Data Link Layer is specified in ITU-T recommendation G.9961. The encryption requirement for G.9961 is based on AES-CCM; an authenticated encryption block cipher mode which was originally conceived to provide data confidentiality, integrity and origin authentication for use in the IEEE 802.11i standard.
The Helion G.9961 AES-CCM (“AES-G.hn”) core is designed to sit near the top of the LLC sublayer and provide the security functionality described in Section 9.1 of ITU-T G.9961. The core integrates all of the underlying functions required to implement AES in CCM mode for G.9961 including nonce and header formation, round-key expansion, counter management, block chaining, final block masking, and tag appending and checking features. The only external logic required is to insert the CCMP header field for frames that are to be encrypted.
