Elliptic Introduces Ellipsys Security Architecture Premier Security Software Solution for Embedded Systems

- Security IP provider Elliptic today announced the launch of its Ellipsys Security Architecture (ESA). As a leading supplier of security IP for the last six years, Elliptic has developed and licensed a portfolio of robust embedded security products that encompass symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, IPsec, secure boot and content protection through DTCP.

ESA combines these solutions into an overall framework that provides an efficient and portable software solution for embedded security designs. It offers the flexibility to add hardware offload engines either from Elliptic or through cryptographic cores available in popular processors from Intel, Freescale, AMCC and Raza Microelectronics among others.

Today, security is part of almost every product. Security offers privacy and authentication in wireless designs such as Wi-Fi access points, WiMAX or 3GPP base stations, cell phones, media players and high-definition televisions (implementing digital rights management), virtual private networking appliances and storage solutions. Designers looking for an efficient software security solution targeted exclusively at embedded applications can now leverage the Ellipsys Security Architecture for their next design.

ESA offers a framework of multiple security applications as well as several new platform features available to customers. These include:

• Improved performance for asymmetric algorithms;
• Significant reductions in memory requirements;
• Enhanced support of ASN.1 types and decoding for PKI certificate applications; and
• Wider portability to include ARM, MIPS, PowerPC as well as 32- and 62-bit Intel architectures.

Customers can pick and choose among the components available in the Elliptic Security Architecture. The ESS-01 for example offers symmetric algorithms that are used in most modern cryptographic solutions including:

• AES
• DES/3DES
• SNOW 3G
• KASUMI
• SHA-1 through SHA-512
• MD5

The asymmetric library - the ESS-02, offers a complete set of RSA and ECC algorithms. The RSA functionality is compliant to the PKCS #1 reference implementation with support for both the v1.5 (IETF RFC2437) and v2.1 (IETF RFC3447) algorithms including:

• RSA Encryption and Decryption
• RSA Key Generation
• RSA Signing and Verification
• ASN.1 Encoding and Decoding
• ECC Encryption and Decryption
• ECC Key Generation
• ECC Signing and Verification

ESA offers significant performance enhancements for the 160-bit prime field ECC algorithm along with the five NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) recommended prime field curves (192-, 224-, 256-, 384- and 521-bit curves). The 160-bit algorithm achieves higher performance through the addition of fast 160-bit multipliers. The NIST prime field algorithms are enhanced through reduction code for 32-bit platforms which offers a 29% speed improvement to embedded developers implementing design on ARM, MIPS and PowerPC platforms.

Elliptic offers a complete Digital Transmission Content Protection (DTCP) stack as part of the ESA which is fully compliant to the standard published by the DTLA. It supports DTCP-IP natively and can be adapted to multiple operating systems and any of the physical interfaces specified by the DTLA. It is licensed in C source code to facilitate porting to the target embedded system. Elliptic plans to extend the solution to support WirelessHD and will be offering a derivative product to support HDCP Version 2 early in 2009.

Platform security is supported through the ESS-04 Secure Boot tool kit which offers a reference implementation of secure boot and secure update to cryptographically verify and optionally decrypt code before booting the processor. This ensures that the code being executed has not been accidentally or maliciously changed by a hacker. The tool kit supports an all-software solution or hardware key storage and acceleration when required.

Lastly, the ESS-03 Linux IPsec middleware solution offers a drop-in solution to accelerate IPsec performance with Elliptic or third party hardware offload engines. Customers are increasingly pressing the limits of software capabilities in IPsec and integrating hardware offload is becoming common place. The ESS-03 provides a ready-made solution which supports multiple Elliptic hardware offload engines and it can be enhanced to adapt to cryptographic accelerators that are now available in many commercial processors.

All ESA components are available for immediate licensing. Existing customers of the previous release of Ellipsys are encouraged to upgrade and special incentive pricing to encourage the upgrade is available during the 90 day introductory period.

About Elliptic

Ranked as the fastest growing provider of security semiconductor IP by Gartner for the last two years, Elliptic licenses semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) cores and software for secure communications ranging from low power to multi-gigabit per second implementations.  Elliptic SIP cores enable system-on-chip designers to efficiently balance power, performance and silicon area in complex security-based systems.  Ellipsys Security Architecture (ESA) software offers a complete set of symmetric and asymmetric algorithms in C source code targeted at embedded applications. Ellipsys support all popular cipher and hash algorithms as well as asymmetric cryptography including ECC and RSA operations. Demanding customers in markets such as wireless, storage, content distribution, implantable medical devices and high performance communications trust embedded security solutions from Elliptic. The company was founded in 2001 and has customers in the United States, Israel, China, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, Europe and Canada. For more information please visit www.ellipticsemi.com.