Blueshift Memory’s proprietary high-speed memory architecture is getting paired with encryption capabilities to help counter threats from quantum computing.

The Cambridge, U.K., company has signed an agreement with London-based Crypta Labs, developer of a quantum random-number generator (QRNG) that enables resilient encryption.

For all the advances that quantum computing promises, it also has a great deal of potential to break the security of common activities and could result in more data breaches of sensitive health and financial data, as well as challenge the integrity of digital documents and even break certain cryptocurrency encryption.

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In a briefing with EE Times, Peter Marosan, founder and CTO of Blueshift Memory, said the company’s non-von Neumann computer architecture already offers a high level of intrinsic cybersecurity. Working with Crypta Labs, however, adds quantum-resilient protection, enabling data to be encrypted within the memory, which can only be read by the CXL-connected CPU, he said. “It’s a smart memory.”

Marosan added that CPUs are getting increasingly faster, but the memory is staying the same, so Blueshift’s vision was to make a smarter memory that speeds up communication with the CPU and improves data protection.

Blueshift’s proprietary chip design, which the company calls the Cambridge Architecture, optimizes the memory architecture for more efficient handling of large datasets and time-critical data. It was designed to replace the modified Harvard architecture, as well as overcome the traditional constraints of the von Neumann bottleneck.

The company’s Cambridge Architecture recently received the Most Innovative Memory Technology award in the Memory Accelerator Architecture category at the Flash Memory Summit Best of Show Awards in Santa Clara, California.

The architecture enables up to 1,000× faster memory access for specific data-focused applications, including high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, machine vision for augmented and virtual reality, 5G edge connectivity and the internet of things.

Sarmad Adeel, senior embedded design engineer at Blueshift, said modern computing architectures have many memory accesses that load up the CPU. “The CPU is not free for doing anything else.”

He added that Blueshift’s architecture reduces power consumption, increases performance and reduces the code load of the CPU.

Marosan said working with Crypta Labs extends the potential market for Blueshift into defense and security applications. “We have some inherent security, but it actually gives us a much higher level of security.”

Crypta Labs is essentially bringing its QRNG technology into the Blueshift architecture to create a secure memory solution, Crypta Labs CEO Jon Maliepaard told EE Times in the same briefing. The company has developed a discrete Quantum Optics Module (QOM) and embedded software that Blueshift will integrate into its Cambridge Architecture FPGA module to create a cybersecurity memory solution capable of thwarting threats, including those from quantum computing, which he said poses a definitive threat.

The foundation of encryption is a random number, which is increasingly under attack, as many so-called random numbers are in fact created by a pseudo-random generator. Crypta Labs is using photons as a source of entropy to develop a fast, reliable method to generate true random numbers from that entropy using a QOM. Maliepaard said this ensures that a very secure random number is generated.

“We also have a number of health checks on the environment, so we don’t just generate a random number and spew it out,” he added.

Crypta Labs has developed a discrete QOM and embedded software that Blueshift will integrate into its Cambridge Architecture FPGA module to create a cybersecurity memory solution.

The solution also applies National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) probability checks and algorithm suites. “Only once we show that there is no predictability in the number do we hand that entropy over to the specific environment, and that is used to generate a key,” Maliepaard said.

NIST has been developing techniques to identify post-quantum cryptographic algorithms since 2016 to better protect critical government and public infrastructure from threat actors looking to steal data now to decrypt later using quantum computing.

Maliepaard describes the initial collaboration with Blueshift as a “minimum viable product” but said there’s a longer-term view to integrating Crypta Labs’ technology directly in the Blueshift architecture.

“Our belief is that when quantum computers do scale up to a point where they’re able to break encryption, this is going to be kind of the last man standing,” he said.

Securing memory and using it to better protect systems at the hardware level has become increasingly important, especially as attack surfaces proliferate with the growth of IoT devices and edge computing. Hardware-enabled security has also become essential to maintaining the integrity of valuable AI workloads.

Rambus recently introduced a full suite of security IP solutions for the FPGA market with state-of-the-art cryptographic, side-channel and quantum-safe protections designed to meet the unique needs of FPGAs used for applications in data centers, IoT, edge computing and AI.

Meanwhile, Crossbar has been applying its ReRAM technology to enable physical unclonable function (PUF) keys that can be generated in secure computing applications. A PUF is a physical object that for a given input and conditions—otherwise known as a “challenge”—provides a physically defined “digital fingerprint” output that acts as a unique identifier, most often for a semiconductor device, such as a microprocessor.

CrossBar ReRAM PUF keys can be implemented using either a single ReRAM cell or a dual ReRAM cell, each representing a single PUF bit.

Adoption of PUF keys has been driven by online banking, the emergence of IoT and an increased need for encryption or a digital signature.

By: DocMemory
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