Hello all,
When dealing with wireless communications we must protect our information by using cryptographic techniques. UWB is not different from any other wireless connection and we must take care of its security as well. There are already a bunch of cryptographic algorithms out there but which algorithm was chosen to be used with UWB ? Is it fast and secure enough ? Let's take a look at UWB Security features.
Ultra Wide Band is using an AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption method to protect all the data traveling over the air.
AES is a block cipher with a fixed 128-bit block size and a variable (128-, 192- or 256-bit) key size. Due to the fixed 128 bits block size, AES operates in a 4 x 4 byte array.
U.S. Government says that:
The design and strength of all key lengths of the AES algorithm (i.e., 128, 192 and 256) are sufficient to protect classified information up to the SECRET level. TOP SECRET information will require use of either the 192 or 256 key lengths. The implementation of AES in products intended to protect national security systems and/or information must be reviewed and certified by NSA prior to their acquisition and use.
OMAP architecture has an AES hardware accelerator which should be used for making cryptographic operations happen faster. Although there's no driver for this yet publicly available it should be developed soon and quite easy using CryptoAPI from Linux Kernel.
This accelerator is located encapsulated with OMAP core as you can see in the picture below:
Among with AES accelerator there are a lot of other security hardware accelerator but this is another story in a later post maybe. By the way, the following image was took from TI's website.
This AES accelerator supports electronic codebook (ECB) and cipher-block chaining (CBC) for all AES block sizes (128-, 192- and 256-bit). There's also DMA support to make it work without creating overheads in the main processor.
Stay tunned to linux-omap gittree and wait for a driver to come for this hardware accelerator.
And that's all for today.