Chacha20-Poly1305 Accelerator

Chacha20-Poly1305 is a symmetric authenticated cipher with associated data (AEAD). It requires a 256 bit secret key and a unique per-operation value called a nonce, a number used once. As well as performing encryption or decryption, the cipher produces a 16 byte message authentication code (MAC) tag that can be used to validate the protected data.

This cipher was introduced as an alternative to AES-GCM and has gained much traction in the industry, particularly in resource-constrained environments. For example, it is now widely used to secure TLS sessions in Android devices.

The Cerberus Chacha20-Poly1305 accelerator is a configurable hardware IP core capable of delivering high speed AEAD performance. The engine is provided as an AXI stream accelerator and can be driven entirely via a DMA engine and linked list using the AXI stream control and status interfaces. Alternatively, control may be managed through a traditional register interface such as an AXI4L slave port.

In addition to Chacha20-Poly1305, XChaCha20-Poly1305 is also supported, which better supports the use-case where the nonce is a randomly generated value.

The engine is capable of directly processing payloads that include associated data headers without CPU intervention, and ultra-high speeds are possible using advanced configurations that exploit parallel computation.

• see the entire Chacha20-Poly1305 Accelerator datasheet
• get in contact with Chacha20-Poly1305 Accelerator Supplier