Barco Silex adds support for the Apple HomeKit

Over the years, the R&D into cryptography has grown rapidly, especially focusing on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). In particular, engineers have been interested in developing new curves to improve the performance, resources and security. Two of these curves, Curve25519 and EdDSA, are now supported by the Apple HomeKit and are well-suited for the growing IoT market. These algorithms will improve the security of connected devices as well as the response time, which is essential for the final user experience. With these additions, the Public Key IP core from Barco Silex now provides full support for the security algorithms required by the Apple HomeKit.

Barco Silex is the first IP provider to offer an IP supporting Curve25519 and Ed25519 on silicon. The BA414E block, designed for asymmetric cryptography, is part of Barco Silex’s library of cryptography IP cores. To this, the company has added a software framework that allows SoC application developers to offload the hardware cryptography transparently.

Sébastien Rabou, Product Manager, Barco Silex, comments: “Thanks to the optimal and modular architecture of the BA414E Public Key IP core, supporting those curves was fairly straightforward. ECC is more than just NIST curves today. Our microcode-based IP core enables us to implement any new schemes and curves very easily. This way, we can keep on serving customers that need the best security available. The flexible nature of our IP core enables support of a large set of public key algorithms with a very small resource usage. For easy integration, we also offer a software API, which achieves a plug-and-play integration.”

“Adding the power of hardware cryptography has now become as easy as adding and recompiling a few software libraries. As a result, the intensive crypto processing is completely offloaded from the processor to the hardware,” adds Rabou.