Xiphera Releases High-Speed ECC Accelerator

The new IP core extends Xiphera’s offering for high-performance solutions and applications, providing both significant speed and comprehensive support of multiple elliptic curves.

February 20, 2024 -- Xiphera releases the high-speed ECC Accelerator for the Asymmetric Cryptography product family. The new IP core continues the expansion of the high-speed and extreme-speed IP core offering in Xiphera’s portfolio. The ECC Accelerator provides both significant speed and comprehensive support of multiple curves and is especially suitable for applications requiring very high speeds, performing over a thousand operations per second. Xiphera’s ECC Accelerator brings advanced security for e.g., telecommunications, data centres, cloud, hyperscalers, and payment applications.

Elliptic curves are a key building block in modern information infrastructure used both for key exchange and digital signatures. They are used, for example, in the TLS protocol. With the looming quantum threat for traditional asymmetric cryptography, elliptic curves will be used for years to come in a hybrid scheme along with Post-Quantum Cryptography.

Xiphera’s offering for NIST Curves in the Asymmetric Cryptography family also includes the compact variants of the ECC IP cores, which are optimised to be as small as possible for applications requiring minimal footprint and resource usage. The new high-speed ECC Accelerator offers a speed-up of tens of times faster than the compact IP cores. The ECC Accelerator natively supports all NIST P-curves, and the curve can be switched on the fly. The different curves provide different levels of security and the execution speed varies accordingly. The IP core allows for easy configuration also for other elliptic curves than NIST P-curves, including customer-specific curves.

Internal high-level block diagram of Xiphera’s high-speed ECC Accelerator IP core (XIP4200H).

The ECC Accelerator provides comprehensive protection against side-channel attacks. Like all Xiphera’s IP cores, the ECC Accelerator protects against timing-based attacks by having constant time operations regardless of its input. The IP core has also been hardened against advanced side-channel attacks including DPA (Differential Power Analysis).

For more information, visit the product page. Open the full product brief in PDF.