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EnSilica, a provider of semiconductor solutions and IP, has launched the eSi-ECDSA cryptographic IP to help meet the high-security communication and latency requirements of automotive Car2Car and Car2Infrastructure (Car2x) applications that form part of emerging intelligent transport systems (ITS).

EnSilica’s eSi-ECDSA cryptographic IP is claimed to be completely compliant with the IEEE 1609.2 and ETSI TS 103 97 standards, which define the security layers in the Car2x communication protocols.

In these protocols, cryptographic algorithms are the primary tools used to safeguard against information security risks such as message confidentiality, integrity, availability and authenticity.

Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) is particularly specified for message authentication, the Elliptic Curve Integrated Encryption Scheme (ECIES) for asymmetric encryption and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) for symmetric encryption.

EnSilica’s eSi-ECDSA is an ASIC acceleration core designed to deliver message-signature verifications required by Car2x ECDSA message authentication.

For message authentication, practical requirements range between 400 and 4000 verifications every second depending on the message beaconing rate of 1Hz to 10Hz and expected worst case vehicle densities on the road.

This overcomes the slow verification rates of traditional embedded software cryptographic algorithm implementations, which only delivers message-signature verifications in the order of 10’s for each second.

"Our eSi-ECDSA cryptographic IP has been designed to easily meet the practical performance requirements demanded by Car2x message authentication."

eSi-ECDSA is claimed to achieve this by off-loading the ECDSA signing and verification operations so that the processor need to only load and read back results through an APB or AHB interface.

Besides, the eSi-ECDSA core features a range of lower level ECC operations, which enable acceleration of ECIES asymmetric encryption, flexible real-time key selection, support for all commonly standardised curves such as NIST, SEC2 and Brainpool, and resistance against timing / power analysis attacks.

EnSilica CEO Ian Lankshear said: "With safety dependent on the underlying communication security of today’s emerging Car2x applications, the performance demands being placed on the prescribed cryptographic algorithms far outweigh the capabilities of traditional embedded software implementations.

"As an ASIC acceleration core that off-loads the arithmetic intensive tasks from the main processor, our eSi-ECDSA cryptographic IP has been designed to easily meet the practical performance requirements demanded by Car2x message authentication."

Image: EnSilica’s eSi-ECDSA cryptographic IP diagram. Photo: Courtesy of Ensilica.