Hifn Brings Security to Conexant Home Network Processors
LOS GATOS, Calif., Oct. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Broadband security intellectual property (IP) owned by network security and flow classification market leader Hifn(TM) (Nasdaq: HIFN) will be used in conjunction with the Conexant Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: CNXT), family of home network processors (HNP) to create joint reference designs, it was announced today as part of an agreement between the two companies.
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"This marks the first time that Hifn has entered into a strategic relationship with its intellectual property," says Chris Kenber, Hifn chairman and CEO. "The home network processor and broadband arenas are perfect for such an arrangement because they gives us a stake in a rapidly growing market, while we develop next generation products in security and flow classification. Conexant is without question best equipped to service the volume requirements of the broadband market."
"This is a classic case of functionality and time to market issues coming together," says Peter Kempf, vice president of business development and technology planning for Conexant's Personal Computing Division. "We are able to immediately offer the Hifn security solution in the home networking and broadband markets by using their existing parts."
The Hifn 79XX security processor series takes over the burden of performing security functions from the highly integrated CPUs commonly used in routers and digital subscriber line (DSL) modems, such as the Conexant HNP and xDSL products. The net result is that the CPU is allowed to support the computational requirements of the IPSec protocol that most secure networks use, while the Hifn processor performs security algorithms such as triple data encryption standard (3-DES) encryption and LZS(R) compression.
Security is emerging as a major requirement in broadband applications due to the "always on" nature of DSL and cable modems, which provide hackers with opportunities for mischief. The 79XX processors perform multi-algorithm acceleration on a single chip, with a powerful on-board IKE processor that can handle the 2048-bit key lengths that are generally deemed all but unbreakable. Supported protocols include IPSec, IPPCP, PPTP, L2TP and PPP. Algorithms that can be performed by the 79XX include LZS and MPPC compression; DES, 3-DES and RC4 Encryption; SHA-1 and MD5 Authentication. The 790XX also generates the true random numbers that are an essential part of the public key infrastructure. Symmetric and public key processing is performed concurrently to ensure non-stop performance. |
