ChaoLogix Inc. (Gainsville, Fla.), a 2005 startup, has made it to market with its first product offering; a standard cell library that supports on-chip security, and which the company claims can deter side-channel analysis attacks.
The technology is called ChaoSecure and it allows different logic functions to operate with similar energy profiles and this can defeat the extraction of logic keys by the examination of IC power and electromagnetic signatures. This provides superior security compared to existing solutions according to the company.
ChaoSecure is a standard cell library that can be integrated into existing IC design flows.
The paper Chaogates: Morphing logic gates that exploit dynamical patterns, authored by engineers from ChaoLogix, was published in the journal Chaos in 2010. The example given is of a two-input, one-output device that can be NOR, NAND, and XOR. However, a spokesperson for ChaoLogix said that Chaogate is an older technology and that references to Chaogate are not applicable to ChaoSecure.
ChaoSecure can be built and fully validated using standard fabrication, assembly and test and sit alongside standard logic and memory on a system-chip. Typically a cryptography engine would be implemented using the ChaoSecure standard cell library and this requires no modification to the logic, so a previously implemented cryptography engine could be re-implemented using ChaoSecure.
"ChaoSecure provides maximum levels of security at minimum levels of power consumption, and we are excited to be working with several prominent IC manufacturers to help protect their next generation of chips," said Brian Kelly, CEO of ChaoLogix, in a statement.
The company said it has verified in silicon that ChaoSecure has intrinsic power dissipation properties that provide an inherent hardware-based immunity to side channel analysis, the prominent tool for deducing encryption keys.
ChaoSecure is one of multiple technologies under development at ChaoLogix, which recently received $5 million from Florida-based private investors and the company's original investor pool in a Series C finance round.
Late in 2013 the company has appointed Chowdary Yanamadala as senior vice president of business development. Prior to joining ChaoLogix, Yanamadala worked as the director of business development for the embedded security business unit at Maxim Integrated Products Inc. Prior to that he served as director of IC design in the same business unit where he was responsible for the design and market introduction of several secure ICs.
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