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SafeNet's Multi-Gigabit Security IP Cores for System on Chip Designs

SafeNet, Inc. announces the availability of new silicon IP cores that deliver the advanced levels of security mandated by new industry standards and market requirements for improved protection of data at rest and data in transit. With the new SafeXcel IP cores, System on Chip (SoC) vendors can now build processors that support the cryptographic algorithms LRW-AES, AES-GCM, SHA-384 and SHA-512, allowing semiconductor vendors to build robust high-performance security into next-generation SoCs.

Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) provides security and ensures that data is kept confidential while at rest, for example on a hard drive, and during transit from one computer to another. AES ciphers are also used to ensure the data origin is coming from the intended source. To address the market demand for integrated high-speed AES crypto solutions, SafeXcel IP AES/GCM/LRW implements the new LRW-AES and AES-GCM algorithms in one single product, together with the widely-used AES feedback modes ECB, CBC, CTR, CFB, and OFB. SafeXcel IP AES/GCM/LRW supports 128-bit, 192-bit, and 256-bit keys for maximum protection and design flexibility.

Driven by the increasing need for high-speed protection of stored data, the LRW-AES cipher is being proposed for the IEEE standard P1619 to enable robust hard disk and tape encryption, among other applications. In addition to LRW-AES, SafeXcel IP AES/GCM/LRW also includes the AES-GCM cipher, which has been designed to provide robust confidentiality and data origin authentication. By allowing a parallelizable authentication implementation, AES-GCM can be used for transmission protocols that require ultra high-speed authenticated encryption, such as protecting information at the data link layer using IEEE 802.1AE security for Ethernet networks, or at the network layer in IPsec ESP. SafeXcel IP configurations that support AES-GCM authenticated encryption with a throughput of 4, 8, 21 and 42 Gbps are available.

Protecting the integrity of data ensures that information has not been tampered with during transit from one computer or network element to another. SHA is a popular algorithm for that purpose. The second addition to SafeNet's SafeXcel IP product line is a new version of SafeXcel IP MD5/SHA Accelerators, which offers any combination of the secure hashing algorithms MD5, SHA-1, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512. With SHA-384 and SHA-512, even higher levels of hash security are now offered for applications such as digital signatures, online transactions and public key infrastructures. Various configurations of SHA IP cores are available from SafeNet, with throughputs up to 3.5 Gbps.



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