editor's blog
Subscribe Now

More Than Encyption and Decryption

The proliferation of nosy and evil people has made internet security increasingly important. I know… that sounds harsh, but it’s true… Why else would we keep hearing about data debacles? And this means that we’ve got to scramble all of our data before sending it so that someone can’t read or hijack it.

Which means encrypting and decrypting all data. And that’s compute-intensive. Which is why it’s almost always hardware-accelerated.

But there’s still effort involved in managing the security engine that does the encryption and decryption. Done at its simplest, a host receives a packet and sends it for decryption; when complete, the host can continue. The host is idle during that time, except for any other tasks the OS might toss in.

Elliptic has released a multi-packet manager that frees the host up from its need to micro-manage the security engine. Instead of working with one packet at a time, the host builds a linked list of packets to be encrypted or decrypted. When it gets a packet that needs security engine attention, it builds a packet descriptor including things like data and key location; that descriptor is attached to the list.

Instead of feeding the security engine each packet, the host now just points the security engine manager to the start of the list, and it can work all the way through to the end. The host can keep adding new packet descriptors to the end of the list while the engine works further up the list. Keys are cached to reduce fetch times.

The intent is that, by abstracting what the host has to worry about up one level, the host can get more done and let the security engine manager worry about the details that it used to have to handle.

More information in their release

Leave a Reply

featured blogs
Jul 25, 2025
Manufacturers cover themselves by saying 'Contents may settle' in fine print on the package, to which I reply, 'Pull the other one'”it's got bells on it!'...

featured paper

Agilex™ 3 vs. Certus-N2 Devices: Head-to-Head Benchmarking on 10 OpenCores Designs

Sponsored by Altera

Explore how Agilex™ 3 FPGAs deliver up to 2.4× higher performance and 30% lower power than comparable low-cost FPGAs in embedded applications. This white paper benchmarks real workloads, highlights key architectural advantages, and shows how Agilex 3 enables efficient AI, vision, and control systems with headroom to scale.

Click to read more

featured chalk talk

On-board Battery Charger & DC-DC Converter
Sponsored by Infineon
In this episode of Chalk Talk, Steven Hehn from Infineon and Amelia Dalton investigate the functions of on board chargers and high voltage to low voltage DC-DC converters for electric vehicles. They also investigate the benefits that wide band gap power technologies can bring to these kinds of designs and the innovative solutions that Infineon offers for your on board charger and DC/DC design needs.
Jul 17, 2025
10,375 views