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Hardware
PDU Processors
The IEEE has ratified the 802.1AE Media Access Control Security (MACsec) standard which offers connectionless user data confidentiality, frame data integrity, and data origin authenticity for LANs, metropolitan optical networks and other applications. The data plane protocol defines the frame format for data encapsulation, encryption, and authenticity using the high performance authenticating cipher GCM-AES. Elliptic's has two products in this space - the LLP-04 MACsec Link Encryptor and the LLP-05 MACsec PDU Processor. The LLP-04 offers both PDU Processing as well as connectivity association (CA) look-up on both the receive and transmit data paths. The LLP-05 is optimized for PDU Processing and allows customers to implement CA look-up elsewhere in the data path.
Elliptic plans to introduce smaller engines targeted at applications requiring bandwidth in the 1 to 20 Gbps range.
For customers developing eNodeB base stations for 3GPP/LTE networks, there are two PDU processor available for use in FPGA to offload SNOW 3G and AES security requirements. The PLP-100f offers the SNOW 3G hardware offload for support of LTE Release 7 and 8. The PLP-101f includes an AES core along with SNOW 3G to provide full compliance with Release 9.
- PLP-100f: SNOW 3G streaming Crypto Offload Protocol Engine (sCOPE)
- PLP-101f: AES/SNOW 3G streaming Crypto Offload Protocol Engine (sCOPE)
The LLP-02 802.16/WiMAX Security PDU Processor was the first member of a family of flow through security cores. The WiMAX security standard as currently captured in IEEE standard 802.16e-2005 was ratified in December 2005. The LLP-02 implements all security aspects of this standard in a flow-through or 'bump-in the-MAC' architecture thereby simplifying and speeding time to market for SoC designers implementing WiMAX SoCs.
The LLP-03 PDU Processor is the newest member of the family. The WiMAX Forum recently introduced a mobile profile for security which implements a single authenticating cipher (AES-CCM). This permits SoC designs to implement a smaller, more cost-effective solution for mobile Subscriber Station and Base Station applications.
Elliptic's family of ESP/AH engines are also classified as PDU processors. In this case, the engines implement the packet transforms required for IPsec Encapsulating Security Protocol and Authentication Header as defined in IETF RFC 4301 Security Architecture for the Internet Protocol. There are two engines in this family - the CLP-25 which offers high performance IPsec processing for gateway applications and the CLP-36 which is a cost reduced version of the CLP-25 with smaller gate count, memory requirement and lower throughput. The CLP-36 is ideal for handsets or low performance gateway applications. Both engines offer crypto offload capabilities which allow them to support protocols such as SRTP.
