Elliptic Technologies Offers Solution to Longstanding Security challenge - implementing asymmetric or public key cryptography

February 16, 2010 – Ottawa, Canada: Security IP provider Elliptic today announced that it has released a comprehensive solution to perhaps the most difficult challenge today facing designers in security – implementing asymmetric or public key cryptography.  

Asymmetric cryptography is used in key exchange and digital signature algorithms which are used, for example, to establish encrypted sessions on the Internet. The algorithms used in asymmetric cryptography are very difficult to implement and the new Elliptic tools significantly simplify the process.

Elliptic offers customers great flexibility in implementing asymmetric cryptography. Customers can choose to implement an all software solution, the Ellipsys security toolkit with asymmetric algorithms such as Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) using prime field curves from 160- to 521-bits, binary field curves ranging from 163- to 571-bits and RSA cryptography with key sizes of up to 4096-bits. Ellipsys is now shipping at Release 3.2 which offers greatly enhanced features such as broad industry standard APIs, extensive support for X.509 certificates and key generation capabilities.

In many cases, developers implementing asymmetric cryptography find an all software solution too slow to meet the system performance requirements due to the computationally intense operations required. Elliptic offers a family of hardware co-processors engines including engines targeted at both RSA and prime field ECC and a binary curve ECC engine. In both cases, Ellipsys software integrates the hardware operations through simple compile time switches thereby ensuring seamless transition between all software solutions to those which support hardware offload. Elliptic hardware offload is available as either FPGA or ASIC solutions for maximum flexibility.

It features significantly increased throughput and reduced size while preserving backwards compatibility with the silicon proven predecessor, the CLP-23. Depending on the configuration selection, the CLP-300 performance can be as much as 130% higher than the CLP-23.

“With the enhanced capabilities of Ellipsys 3.2 and the enhanced performance of the CLP-300 Public Key Accelerator, Elliptic offers the industry’s most comprehensive system solution for asymmetric cryptography.” said Richard White, President and CEO of Elliptic Technologies. “When combined with the industry’s best quality and renowned post-sales support, Elliptic has become by far the preferred vendor for developers wishing to complete these complex security designs on time and on budget.”