April 15, 2009 -- IP Cores, Inc. has announced availability of a version of the Kasumi cipher with very low gate count and power consumption. Along with the ultracompact AES cipher, this core can be used in the new mobile communication devices for 3G networks.
"Design decisions allowed us today to offer a Kasumi cryptographic core that is about two times smaller than the cores currently on the market," said Dmitri Varsanofiev, CTO of IP Cores. "In the encryption field, power consumption is typically proportional to the number of gates, so this core produces substantial power savings in battery-operated designs."
The modern mobile data communications standardized through 3GPP typically use for encryption one of the three ciphers: Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Snow 3G, or Kasumi.
The Kasumi block cipher (also known as A5/3) had been designed by SAGE and is used in the f8 and f9 algorithms of the 3GPP data interface. The KSM1 core by IP Cores, implements the and utilizes only 5.5K gates in a typical 65-nm ASIC process.
