Xiphera Announces Quantum-Resistant Secure Boot

The new Secure Boot for the nQrux® Hardware Trust Engines family uses a hybrid signature scheme, offering a fundamental building block for creating trust in computing systems.

August 28, 2024 -- Xiphera introduces nQrux® Secure Boot – a new solution for secure boot in Xiphera’s nQrux® Hardware Trust Engines family. The solution provides quantum-secure authentication for boot images and firmware updates.

Secure boot provides assurance of functional integrity, a critical step for establishing trust in any computing system in operation. Xiphera’s nQrux® Secure Boot verifies digital signatures attached to the binary image loaded into a computing system, preventing malicious actors from injecting their own code into the system and ensuring trust in the system.

nQrux® Secure Boot uses a hybrid signature scheme consisting of ECDSA, a traditional digital signature scheme based on elliptic curves, and new quantum-secure signature scheme ML-DSA, both standardised by the American National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The hybrid solution ensures system security even if quantum computers break ECDSA in the future, or if a weakness is identified in the new ML-DSA standard. nQrux® Secure Boot is based on pure digital logic and does not include any hidden software components, providing first-class security and easier validation and certification.

“Secure boot is a fundamental requirement in creating trust in computing systems,” says Kimmo Järvinen, co-founder and CTO of Xiphera. “nQrux® Secure Boot is a valuable addition to our product family for hardware trust engines. It combines standardised cutting-edge Post-Quantum Cryptography with Xiphera’s pure hardware-based digital design”.

nQrux® Secure Boot is delivered as a device and process node agnostic IP core, easily integrated across FPGA and ASIC architectures. The IP core will be available for customer evaluations in Q4/2024.

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