Elliptic's NEW security Engine does double duty Between key management and Application processors

June 1, 2011 – OTTAWA, CANADA: Elliptic Technologies, a leading supplier of security IP and software, has announced the immediate availability of its highly programmable and configurable security accelerator and Hardware Security Module, SPAcc-HSM. This unique security engine provides reliable protection for sensitive data and transactions and can be shared simultaneously with an application processor that requires lower levels of security.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) and content protection standards, such as Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP) demand robust security schemes to protect sensitive key information from non-authorized use. Elliptic’s SPAcc-HSM provides a highly-secure infrastructure for key storage and high-throughput cryptographic operations, and at the same time it can be shared securely and reliably with an application processor that has lower security needs.

“For many systems and SoCs, it is very important to protect and differentiate secure transactions such as key management from other transactions.” said Vijay Dube, President and CEO of Elliptic Technologies. “Our main goal with the security protocol accelerator SPAcc-HSM is to offer our customers the ability to share a single proven, cost and power-efficient engine between processors with different levels of security.”

The SPAcc-HSM provides specialized access control to key management and application processors and ensures that the security boundaries between the two domains are strictly enforced. The sharing of cryptographic resources between the two processors allows for significant gate count reduction and smaller memory footprint.

The SPAcc-HSM can be preconfigured to match exactly the system requirements and has two traffic separation paradigms, shared mode - to allow for a more flexible context allocation during run-time, and virtual mode - to significantly simplify the software implementation side, but with context resources fixed between security domains.

To meet the needs of multiple security applications such as 3GPP/LTE-Advanced, IPsec, WiMAX, SRTP, MACsec and storage, the SPAcc-HSM offers support for all required cipher and message authentication algorithms. This allows designers to seamlessly integrate security functions tuned for the specific applications the SoCs are targeted at.

About Elliptic Technologies

Ranked as the fastest growing provider of security semiconductor IP by Gartner for the last four years, Elliptic licenses Semiconductor Intellectual Property (SIP) cores and software for ASIC manufacturers and embedded system OEMs. Elliptic SIP cores enable system-on-chip designers to efficiently balance power, performance and silicon area in complex security-based systems. The Ellipsys Trust Framework (ETF) allows customers to implement secure, trusted platforms and networks, including platform integrity assurance, secure networking, product anti-cloning and anti-counterfeiting, and other advanced solutions. The Ellipsys Cryptography Middleware offers a complete set of symmetric and asymmetric algorithms in C source code targeted at embedded applications. Demanding customers in markets such as wired and wireless networking, storage, content distribution and implantable medical devices trust embedded security solutions from Elliptic. The company founded in 2001 is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, and has established a worldwide customer base and sales channels. For more information please visit www.elliptictech.com.