Challenge

Recognizing that device manufacturers face some major challenges today to differentiate themselves from their competitors, Texas Instruments partnered with Certicom to deliver a tightly-integrated device platform that provides an easy way to quickly integrate strong security in their devices to minimize cost and time-to-market while not affecting performance and reliability.

Solution

Together, TI and Certicom worked to optimize security for the OMAP family of processors by taking advantage of cryptographic functions, communications protocols and PKI functionality that are provided by Security Builder® Crypto™Security Builder® SSL™, and Security Builder® PKI™.

The toolkits use system resources efficiently and allow manufacturers to build security directly into their devices economically.

The integrated solution of the processor and the Security Builder toolkits can act as the devices’ cryptographic service provider. Applications running on a device have the option to access optimized cryptographic functions through the operating system.

To improve performance, the core cryptographic module includes hardware accelerators that support DES, 3DES, AES, SHA-1 and other key standard-based security operations. Cryptographic acceleration, secure key storage and true random number generation operations are all handled on the chip. Public-key is offloaded to DSP to increase speed of operations. Encryption algorithms execute natively on the processor platform at the hardware level and take advantage of the many resources available there.

Value

The combination of Certicom’s wireless security expertise and TI's OMAP family of processors have produced a complete, fully integrated and trusted platform for the development of real-time, multimedia-rich products such as 2.5G and 3G wireless handsets and PDAs. Device manufacturers now have an opportunity to provide customers with devices that have a full range of built-in security capabilities that meet time-to-market, cost, and performance requirements.