Silex Inside upgrades IP offering for compatibility with Chinese security standards

Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium – Silex Inside, a provider of IP cores for cryptography, announces that it has upgraded its hardware IP blocks for security to adhere to the SM2, SM3, and SM4 standards for secure communication defined by the Chinese authorities. Also its comprehensive hardware security solution is now ready to be built into products that are compatible with Chinese official standards. With the upgrade, Silex Inside gives its customers a further guarantee that their products will be both future-proof and successful worldwide.

The Chinese authorities have defined a number of complementary standards and algorithms for secure communication. These include SM2, a public key cryptographic algorithm based on elliptic curves, used for e.g. generation and verification of digital signatures; SM3, a hashing algorithm comparable to SHA-256; and SM4, a block cipher algorithm for symmetric cryptography comparable to AES-128. These standards are becoming widely used in Chinese commercial applications such as banking and telecommunications and are sometimes made mandatory for products procured by Chinese government agencies.

As a leading provider of hardware blocks and solutions for global secure communication, Silex Inside has now added these standards to its hardware IP blocks that already included the most recent and widely used algorithms. The SM2 implementation has been added to block BA414EP, the public key engine. SM3 is now part of BA413, the fast and complete hashing engine. And SM4 has been implemented in a new, dedicated IP core BA419. All these upgraded blocks are also part of Silex Inside’s comprehensive root of trust hardware solution eSecure.

Pieter Willems, Sales Manager Security Products at Silex Inside comments: “With these latest additions to our hardware blocks we offer our customers a further competitive advantage. Our hardware blocks not only result in a faster and better security than comparable software solutions, but these new standards also make them ready for current and future requirements of commercial applications on the Chinese market.”