
HIGH-PERFORMANCE SECURITY SOLUTIONS
WITH MOTOROLA NETWORK PROCESSORS
AND CORRENT SECURITY PROCESSORS
There is a clear move to heighten security in all indus-
tries — migrating from unprotected networks to ones
that support only encrypted or authenticated data.
Corporations are expected to spend over $12 billion to
ensure that sensitive corporate information is kept
secure as they shift their mission-critical applications to
the Internet.
Network equipment vendors initially implemented secu-
rity through software, enabling their customers to add
security standards such as Internet Protocol Security
(IPSec) or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to existing systems
without changing hardware. While this allowed systems
to claim Virtual Private Network (VPN) support, it quickly
became apparent that customers actually intending to
use their systems for terminating secure tunnels would
be disappointed by security software running on general
purpose hardware. Network processors have been more
successful in implementing security capabilities with
their software-optimized architectures, but internet
speed-ups and increasing security demands have led to a
requirement for special purpose devices that can provide
hardware acceleration of security functions.
Security processors are designed to accelerate the
computationally intensive algorithms associated with
encrypted and authenticated communications. They
off-load the security functions from a network processor
by serving as a coprocessor to the NPU (operating in a
‘look-aside’ fashion) or serving as a stand-alone
processor within a network processing pipeline (oper-
ating ‘in-line’). Look-aside security processors tend to
interoperate and take instruction from the host/control
processor, often working through the NPU. In-line secu-
rity processors interoperate directly with the forwarding
path of an NPU to do fast path security processing. These
processors are ‘packet aware’ and can interpret Encapsu-
lating Security Payload (ESP) and Authentication Headers
(AH) and apply all the necessary processing to pass a
packet without aid of the NPU.
The Fast Path to Secure Internet Communications
Motorola’s C-Port
TM
Network Processor Family may be
used in applications requiring wire-speed security capa-
bilities in the Gigabit Ethernet to OC-48c range. To this
end, Motorola has developed an alliance with Corrent
TM
Corporation to enable smooth integration of high-
performance security functions with the C-Port family.
Corrent is a fabless semiconductor company that
develops high-speed silicon solutions that accelerate
and secure Internet communications.
The Corrent Packet Armor
TM
family provides IPSec secu-
rity solutions for enabling VPNs in access and routing
devices. These security processors can be implemented
in both look-aside and in-line configurations in system
designs. Specific features of the Packet Armor family
include:
Gigabit to OC-192 IPSec capabilities
Security Authentication engine
—
up to 5M SAs/sec
PCI/SPI-3 interfaces along with SPI-4.2
Supports DES, 3DES, AES encryption algorithms
Supports SHA-1 and MD5 HMAC hash algorithms
On chip Modulo Engine
True 3-grade digital randomizer (pending FIPS-140-1)
Smart Networks Alliance
Solutions Brief
FEATURING
CORRENT
F
Freescale Semiconductor, Inc.
For More Information On This Product,
Go to: www.freescale.com
n
.