SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – April 6, 2015 – Rambus Inc. (NASDAQ:RMBS) today announced that its Cryptography Research Division has entered into a partnership agreement with Barco Silex. Through this agreement, Barco Silex can develop DPA resistant solutions that help accelerate time to market of security based products. Barco Silex will utilize Cryptography Research differential power analysis, or DPA, countermeasure technology to help protect against security risks in a variety of point of sale applications, including banking, retailing, mass transit, and wireless telecommunications.
“Side channel attacks are becoming more prevalent, and we need a sound solution to combat this growing risk to ensure customer confidence and protect high value assets,” said Sébastien Rabou, Product Manager at Barco Silex. “The partnership with Rambus allows us to have access to the worldclass cryptography engineers while developing solutions to benefit the point of sale market.”
“The risk of security breaches continues to explode and customers need to quickly get secure solutions into the market,” said Dr. Simon Blakeâ ÂWilson, vice president of Products and Marketing of the Rambus Cryptography Research division. “By partnering with Barco Silex, we have created another channel that will accelerate time to market with advanced security technology.”
Concerns about DPA security attacks originated in the smartcard market; however, the potential for these attacks is spreading into many other markets. For this reason, there is a need for DPA countermeasures to be adopted across all markets where valuable financial and personal data is being handled. Today, products commonly at risk include point of sale devices, mobile phones, secure USB flash drives, pay television set top boxes, and optical disc players among others.
DPA is a type of side channel attack that involves monitoring variations in the electrical power consumption or EM emissions from a target device. These measurements can then be used to derive cryptographic keys and other sensitive information from chips. Rambus Cryptography Research DPA countermeasure technologies are a proven solution for protecting devices against the extraction of cryptographic keys and private data through side channel attacks. Highly flexible, these solutions can be optimized for performance, size and security level, allowing customers to help fend off unauthorized access to critical information. Having discovered side channel attacks, Cryptography Research scientists have developed a comprehensive portfolio of application specific hardware core and software library solutions that chipmakers can use to build DPA resistant products. These DPA resistant solutions can be integrated into a wide range of SoCs, including power sensitive mobile applications, highly secure antitampering and performance driven multi core processors.
Barco Silex has joined the Rambus Partner Program, which will enable further collaboration on other combined IP blocks offerings between the two companies. For additional information on the Rambus Partner Program, visit www.rambus.com/partners.