Rambus Cryptography Research helps Barco Silex thwart PoS security threats

The Cryptography Research division of Rambus recently clinched a partnership agreement with Barco Silex. According to Rambus Cryptography VP Dr. Simon Blake-Wilson, the agreement allows Barco Silex to develop DPA-resistant solutions that will help accelerate time-to-market for security-based products.

“The risk of breaches continues to explode and customers need to quickly get secure solutions into the market,” said Blake-Wilson.

“This is why Barco Silex will be utilizing differential power analysis, or DPA, countermeasure technology to help protect against security risks in a variety of point-of-sale applications. These include banking, retailing, mass transit and wireless telecommunications.”

Sébastien Rabou, Product Manager at Barco Silex, expressed similar sentiments.

“Side-channel attacks are becoming more prevalent and we need a sound solution to combat this growing risk to ensure customer confidence and protect high value assets,” Rabou explained. “The partnership with Rambus provides us with access to world-class cryptography engineers – while developing solutions to benefit the point-of-sale market.”

As Blake-Wilson notes, concerns about DPA security breaches originally surfaced in the smartcard space. Nevertheless, the potential for such attacks is quickly spreading into numerous markets.

“For this reason, there is a need for DPA countermeasures to be adopted across all markets where valuable financial and personal data is being handled,” he added. “Today, products commonly at risk include point-of-sale devices, mobile phones, secure USB flash drives, pay television set-top boxes and optical disc players, among others.”

As we’ve previously discussed on Rambus Press, DPA countermeasures developed by the company’s Cryptography Research Division offer a combination of software, hardware and protocol techniques specifically designed to shield tamper-resistant devices from side-channel attacks. These include leak reduction, incorporating randomness, generating amplitude and temporal noise, as well as executing protocol-level countermeasures.

Interested in learning more about how Rambus is helping to secure SoCs, devices and content? You can read more about our DPA countermeasures here, CryptoFireWall Cores here and CryptoManager platform here.