Silex introduces new solution to accelerate cryptographic operations on FPGA or ASIC

Silex Insight, a provider of cryptographic IP solutions, announced today it is now extending its offering by introducing a Network Security Crypto Accelerator.

The Network Security Crypto Accelerator is a hardware IP core platform that accelerates cryptographic operations in System-on-Chip (SoC) environment on FPGA or ASIC.

In order to answer the needs of high-performance systems, a new generation of powerful processors is being designed and deployed. These multi-core SoCs contain dedicated hardware accelerators that offload challenging tasks, such as network protocol computation, AI and deep learning, and security.

For a security performance that matches the speed of the new SoCs, the experts at Silex Insight have developed a scalable hardware IP block that handles encryption at speeds from a few Gbps to over 100Gbps, depending on the needs.

The Network Security Crypto Accelerator is used to accelerate/offload MACsec, IPsec, VPN, TLS/SSL, disk encryption, or any other custom application, requiring symmetric cryptography algorithms.

It can also be combined with the eSecure Root of Trust module from Silex Insight to form a complete secure enclave, that will handle the keys without exposing them to the software, which makes it suited for even the most regulated and security-sensitive industries.

Native speeds of hardware cores may remain largely theoretical if the host processor is not able to deliver data to the crypto module and process the results at the same speed.

That is why this Network Security Crypto Accelerator includes a Direct Memory Access (DMA) interface to the host memory space. Here, the operations are efficiently offloaded via a built-in scatter-gather DMA optimized to handle networks packets of any size.

The platform integrates the desired selection of cryptographic IP cores (AES, ChaCha20-Poly1305, SM4, 3GPP, Hash…), with DMA and software layers that are providing a complete solution.

“New data-centric processors require ultra high-performance cryptography that runs at the speed of the network. Our solution combines an on-SoC core with DMA support to allow sustained cryptographic services of over 100Gbps at the system level. In addition, an in-line combination of our eSecure Root of Trust offers a complete solution to our customers.”
– Sébastien Rabou, CTO, Silex Insight