Apple HomeKit acceleration now supported by Barco Silex Crypto Public Key

Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, Feb. 10, 2015 – 

Barco Silex, a leading provider of cryptography IP cores, today announced that it has added support for Apple HomeKit, including Curve25519 and EdDSA in its Public Key IP core. Barco Silex is the first IP provider offering hardware acceleration for these algorithms that are especially suited to secure IoT applications.

During the last years, the R&D into cryptography has massively grown, especially focusing on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). One of the hottest topics in ECC is to develop 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 new algorithms will improve the security of connected devices as well as the response time, which will be essential to 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 Apple HomeKit.

Barco Silex is the first IP provider that offers an IP supporting Curve25519 and Ed25519 on silicon. Sébastien Rabou, Product Manager at Barco Silex, comments: “Thanks to the optimal and modular architecture of the BA414E Public Key IP core, supporting those curves was fairly straightforward. Elliptic curve cryptography 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. And for easy integration, we also offer a software API on top of the BA414E IP core, to achieve a plug-and-play integration.”

The BA414E block for asymmetric cryptography is part of Barco Silex’ library of cryptography IP cores, offering a complete security solution. To this, the company has added a software framework that allows SoC application developers to offload the hardware cryptography transparently. “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,” concludes Sébastien Rabou.

About Barco Silex

Barco Silex is a micro-electronic design house belonging to the Belgian Barco electronic group. Its offices are in Belgium close to capital Brussels and in France in the region of Aix-en Provence.

Barco Silex offers a complete portofolio of high-end design services, from traditional ASIC/FPGA design to advanced SOC/SOPC based system development ,IP integration or design, and board design in the field of :

• image processing,
• communications,
• consumer electronics
• industrial electronics.

We offer to customers partnerships with different selected ASIC, PLD vendors and IP providers, and integrate our expertise in your SoC design and SoPC .

Barco Silex customers include industry leaders and innovators in all areas of electronics, spread all over Europe and overseas.

 Back