Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium – November 5, 2018 – Silex Insight, leading provider of IP cores for secure computing, presents a new version of its Chacha20-Poly1305 hardware crypto engine that is geared towards high-throughput applications. The RFC7539-compliant IP core offers customers future-proof authenticated encryption between highly networked applications, for example in IoT or cloud computing. The new IP core is available for ASIC and FPGA designs. With simple, straightforward interfaces, it is easy to integrate and highly scalable, hallmarks of all Silex Insight’s cores.

The new IP core – codename BA420 – is used to verify the data integrity and the authenticity of messages or packets. It provides authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) using the Chacha20 stream cipher combined with the Poly1305 message authentication code (MAC). Its maximum throughput exceeds several hundreds of Gbps and it can be fully configured to match the specific throughput requirements of the application and hardware platform. For SoC solutions, the core can be combined with optional scatter/gather DMA for easy and efficient integration. Alternatively, BA420 can also be deployed for encryption or authentication separately.

The BA420 block may be combined with the BA415, which implements a high-throughput AES-GCM crypto engine. This combination offers future-proof security, as Chacha20-Poly1305 is a mandatory AEAD (authenticated encryption with associated data) algorithm, as is the AES-GCM, in TLS 1.3. It’s also a more secure alternative to older algorithms in TLS/SSL, the underlying protocol that secures most Internet communication in e.g. browsers (https), voice-over-IP, mobile devices and IoT applications. Therefore, Chacha20-Poly1305 has been adopted and deployed by major companies such as Google (Chrome browser, Android mobile devices) and Apple (Apple HomeKit for IoT devices).

Both BA415 and the new BA420 can be included in Silex Insight’s comprehensive root-of-trust hardware solution BA470.

“With this dedicated high-throughput version of Chacha20-Poly1305, we complement our solutions for highly networked servers, the heart of today’s IoT or cloud computing” says Sébastien Rabou, Director of the embedded security group at Silex Insight. “This new IP core does not only allow our customers to create dedicated ASIC solutions but also to create high performance FPGA accelerators on existing cloud platform like AWS or others.”