SYSTEMS

Cavium NFBE Adapters Integrate OCTEON and NITROX Processors to Deliver FIPS-Certified Stringent Security and Leading Performance for Government, Banking and Healthcare Applications

Cavium Networks has announced that Citrix Systems has integrated Cavium's NITROX XL CN16XX NFBE HSM Adapters to achieve Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2, Level 2 compliance in four new Citrix NetScaler MPX Platforms. These NetScaler platforms benefit from the world's fastest SSL security performance of 5 Gigabits/sec and 45,000 RSA Operations/sec, high speed IO connectivity, compact form factor, and future proof features that enable FIPS 140-2 Level 3 as well as FIPS 140-3 support, offered by Cavium's FIPS 140-2 Level 2 & 3 certified Hardware Security Module (HSM) Adapters. FIPS certified HSMs are becoming a growing requirement for government, financial and healthcare applications.

HSMs are physical devices with a tamper-resistant enclosure that can be attached directly to the appliance, server or general purpose computer. HSMs provide both logical and physical protection of secure keys from non-authorized use and potential adversaries and are widely used in the industry for managing digital keys, accelerating digital signings/second and for providing strong authentication to access critical keys for server applications. Achieving FIPS 140-2 level 2 and 3 certification requires significant expertise and time, and OEMs leverage pre-certified HSMs to significantly reduce research and development cost and time-to-market of their systems.

Two key trends in the networking marketplace are driving the need for high performance HSMs. First, network encryption performance requirements have grown significantly due to the increased adoption of encryption and the mandate for 2048 bit keys in SSL certificates. Second, encrypted Web traffic is becoming critical for Department of Defense (DoD) and federal civilian agencies. The NITROX XL CN16XX-NFBE Adapter family delivers market leading performance for both symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic operations including 2048 bit keys and trusted security for government/DoD, financial and healthcare applications.

"The Citrix NetScaler MPX FIPS models accelerate the performance and improve the security of web-based applications for Department of Defense and civilian agencies," said Sunil Potti, vice president of product management and marketing, networking and cloud product group at Citrix. "Cavium's NITROX XL NFBE adapters offer highly scalable performance and future-proofing capabilities that allow us to deliver a high performance platform in a short timeframe. We expect to widely deploy these platforms in federal, financial and healthcare markets."

NITROX XL CN16XX-NFBE Adapter Family Cavium Networks NITROX XL NFBE FIPS 140-2 level 2 and 3 adapters perform all asymmetric and symmetric key management within the tamper proof enclosure. The functions include secure user login/authentication, user-authorized key creation/deletion, on-card key storage, and secure off-card key archiving/sharing.

In addition to typical FIPS HSM functionality, the NITROX XL CN16XX NFBE also supports an option for two ports of Gigabit Ethernet, adding NIC functionality to the HSM adapter. The PCIe Gen2 adapter also supports a USB interface used for a Level 3 solution. The NITROX XL CN16XX-NFBE adapter family is a future-proof design that can be upgraded to the FIPS140-3 specification, and ECC for digital signing with a firmware update. This family is offered in multiple SKUs spanning in performance from 7,000 RSA Ops/sec and < 1 Gbps to 45,000 RSA Ops/Sec and 5 Gbps.