Smart Engine for Public Key cryptography

Sébastien Rabou, Denis Galerin, Thierry Pauwels
Barco Silex

The need for security in embedded application is continuously rising. And Public Key cryptography is one of the most common ways to secure data communication. But Public Key processing requires very large computation capability.

Processors are commonly used to perform very complex operations. However, the heavy processing load generated by Public Key cannot be addressed by CPUs without significantly degrading system performances.

Of course, we can use hardware accelerators. But, pure RTL blocks are not flexible enough to support the various Public Key algorithms (ECC, RSA, ECDSA, …). Moreover, data transfers must still be controlled by the main processor.

Smart Engine provides the optimal combination of hardware and software (micro-code). This kind of architecture provides the best of both worlds: the efficiency of hardware and the flexibility of software.

Furthermore, the Smart Engine can be scalable. It will always provide an optimal balance between gate-count, performance, functionality and power. And by supporting standard interfaces, the Smart Engine is really easy to integrate in complex system.

This white paper explains why and how the Smart Engine is ideally applied to Public Key cryptography. It provides more details about the architecture as we have implemented it in the BA414E Public Key Crypto Engine.