Transmetta adds security to its chips

Author
Aron Schatz
Posted
January 14, 2003
Views
1428
Tags CPU

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I got an email from Transmetta's PR people saying that they're adding new security enhancement features to their CPUs.

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As the demand for transmitting and storing digital data continues to increase, so does the need to secure these operations, especially when managing confidential information ranging from personal passwords and financial records to proprietary business data and national security secrets.
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Providing secure storage of certificates and keys used for the authentication or encryption of confidential data for wired and wireless transmissions is a critical challenge facing the computer industry and end users. The storage of such information must be tamper-resistant. Current solutions, such as Smart Cards and the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance's (TCPA) Trusted Platform Module (TPM), are external components that add cost and increase both design complexity and system space requirements.
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Transmeta's hardware support for DES, DES-X and Triple-DES is designed to accelerate security applications such as file and disk data encryption and the Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) algorithm commonly used in Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to secure both wired and wireless data transmissions. Transmeta will provide interfaces to this hardware encryption engine via cryptographic instructions that are an extension to the x86 instruction set architecture. Named the Transmeta Security Extensions (TSX), these instructions will support key preparation and the DES, DES-X and Triple-DES ciphers. TSX instructions allow programmers to leverage Transmeta's encryption acceleration hardware for increased performance when protecting data.

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