IP Cores, Inc. Announces a MACsec (IEEE 802.1ae) Security Processor IP Core.

IP Cores, Inc.  Announces a New Encryption Core Supporting the MACsec Security Protocol.

Palo Alto, California -- July 29, 2010 -- IP Cores, Inc. has announced  the first core of its new high-speed MACsec security processor family.  

"Our new MSP1 core contains a complete implementation of the MACsec security protocol as defined by the IEEE 802.1 standardization body," said Dmitri Varsanofiev, CTO of IP Cores. "The lightweight flexible implementation of the MSP1 core makes it particularly suitable for the passive optical networks (PON, EPON) applications".

MACsec

MACsec is the IEEE MAC Security standard (also known as 802.1AE) that defines connectionless data confidentiality and integrity for media access protocols. It is standardized by the IEEE 802.1 working group. MACsec specifies the implementation of a MAC Security Entities (SecY) and defines MACsec frame format, which is similar to the Ethernet frame, but includes additional fields (Security Tag and Message authentication code or ICV).

MACsec uses Galois/Counter Mode of Advanced Encryption Standard cipher with 128-bit key (AES-GCM-128) as a default cipher suite.

Security tag inside each frame in addition to EtherType includes association number within the channel and packet number to provide unique initialization vector for encryption and authentication algorithms as well as protection against replay attack as well as the secure channel identifier.

MSP1 Core

MSP1 supports the NIST standard AES cipher in the GCM mode for encryption and message authentication, as well as header parsing and formatting operations on the transmitted and received packets, including insertion and removal of the SecTag with the packet number (PN) and an optional SCI field, RX packet validation, insertion, validation and removal of the ICV, replay protection based on the PN windowing.

The MSP1-PON option is tuned for Passive Optics Networks (PON)  IEEE 802.1ae applications at the data rates  of 10-100 Gbps.

MSP1 datasheet is available on the IP Cores, Inc. Web site at http://ipcores.com/msp1_macsec_processor_ip_core.htm .

For more information about IP Cores’ product line, please visit www.ipcores.com .

About IP Cores, Inc.

IP Cores is a rapidly growing company in the field of security, error correction, and DSP IP cores. Founded in 2004, the company provides IP cores for communications and  storage fields, including AES-based ECB/CBC/OCB/CFB, AES-GCM and AES-XTS cores, flow-through AES/CCM cores with header parsing for IEEE 802.11 (WiFi), 802.16e (WiMAX), 802.15.3 (MBOA), 802.15.4 (Zigbee), public-key accelerators for RSA and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generators (CS PRNG), secure SHA and MD5 hashes, lossless data compression cores, low-latency fixed and floating-point FFT and  IFFT cores, as well as cyclic, Reed-Solomon, BCH and Viterbi decoder cores.