The Multipurpose Security Protocol Accelerator (SPAcc) offers designers unprecedented configurability to address the complex security requirements that are commonplace in today's multi-function, high-performance SoC designs. Increasingly, these designs include security at the MAC layer (e.g., Wi-Fi, MACsec or 3GPP/LTE), VPN security with IPsec and TLS/DTLS, application layer security such as SRTP, and content protection. Compounding the challenge is the need to support high throughput requirements with mixed packet size traffic characteristics along with low latency requirements to preserve quality of service in voice and video applications in single- and multi-core processor architectures.
Most security protocols require computationally intensive confidentiality and authentication algorithms to be applied to the data. The Multipurpose SPAcc provides a framework including a programmable sequencer, secure DMA engine, and cryptographic/hashing resources that can handle a variety of protocols, such as IPsec, TLS/DTLS, SRTP, Wi-Fi, MACsec, content protection, and 3GPP/LTE/LTE-A. The Multipurpose SPAcc reduces the bus traffic and offers increased throughput by supporting efficient data sequencing as well as parallel processing of cryptographic operations (authentication and encryption/decryption).
Specifically for automotive applications, the Security Protocol Accelerator has been certified by SGS-TÜV for functional safety ISO-26262 ASIL B level compliance with ASIL D safety integrity for systematic faults and ASIL B for random hardware faults.