Chipmaker Via has updated its SDK (software development kit) for engineers interested in exploiting “military-grade security” features in its processors. The revised Via PadLock Security Engine SDK adds support for Via's C7/C7-M mobile and embedded chips, and offers a “comprehensive” set of security tools for… Linux and Windows developers, the company says.

Via announced the C7 in May, claiming the chip would better Intel's Pentium M in performance-per-Watt. It also said the new chips would offer the world's best random number generators (RNGs), and cryptographic acceleration for algorithms used in security protocols mandated by US government standards. The C7/C7-M chips also support the execute protection bit (NX), a security feature implemented by Microsoft Windows XP with SP2, and possibly other OSes, on supported processors. The C7 and C7-M were slated to start production in an IBM facility in Q2, 2005.

Via has long offered advanced RNGs and other security features in its C3 and C5J (Nehemiah) desktop chips, Antaur mobile chips, and Eden chips for the embedded market. The company began offering its PadLock SDK about a year and a half ago. In addition to supporting new capabilities in the C7/C7-M chips, the revised SDK is backwards-compatible with older Via chips, the company says.

New security capabilities in the C7/C7-M chips that are supported by the new PadLock SDK include:

• Claimed world's fastest x86 AES encryption engine
• A secure hash engine, for digests that ensure data integrity
  • Supports SHA-1 and SHA-256
• A Montgomery Multiplier to accelerate public key encryption such as RSA
  • Supports key sizes up to 32KB
• Dual quantum-based random number generators

The new PadLock SDK consists of a programming guide, source code for Linux and Windows, and numerous sample and reference applications that provide code that can be directly copied into other programs, Via says. The SDK is licensed under the GNU GPL.

VP of Corporate Marketing, Richard Brown, said, “As VIA C7 and C7-M processor systems arrive on the market, we have a real opportunity to implement pervasive secure computing. Professional and novice software developers alike can [use the SDK] to simply and easily integrate military-grade security.”

Glen Henry, who heads Via's Texas-based Centaur processor division, explained his company's approach to security in an exclusive interview with LinuxDevices last June. Henry said:

Encrypting of data's been around for a long time. We believe, though, that this should be a pervasive thing that should appear on all platforms, and should be built into all things.

It turns out, though, that security features are all computationally intensive. That's what they do. They take the bits and grind them up using computations, in a way that makes it hard to un-grind them.

So, we said, they're a perfect candidate for hardware. They're well-defined, they're not very big, they run much faster in hardware than in software — 10 to 30 times, in the examples we use. And, they are so fundamental, that we should add the basic primitives to our processor.

How did we know what to add? We added government standards. The U.S. government has done extensive work on standardizing the encryption protocols, secure digital signature protocols, secure hash protocols. We used the most modern of government standards, built the basic functions into our chip, and did it in such a way that made it very easy for software to use.

Availability

The enhanced VIA PadLock SDK is available for download at Via Arena, here. Additional resources, including Centaur Technologies' PadLock programming guide for the C5J (Nehemiah), are available directly from Via's main site, here.

 
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