MStar Semi selects Cryptography Research for hardware security in its set-top box ICs

Tuesday, September 6th, 2011
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Worldwide leader of TV solutions will include CryptoFirewall™ technology in multimedia video decoding chips

SAN FRANCISCO — IBC 2011 — Cryptography Research, Inc. (CRI), a division of Rambus Inc. (NASDAQ:RMBS) and MStar Semiconductor, Inc., (3697.TW). a global leader in silicon solutions for the consumer and communication markets, today announced that MStar will license CRI’s CryptoFirewall™ security technology for integration into its multimedia system-on-a-chip (SoC) set-top box chips. The advanced security core will help MStar’s customers provide robust hardware security in their set-top box solutions.

“Integrating strong security is crucial in our effort to provide an all-in-one system-on-a-chip solution for the next generation of set-top boxes,” said Philippe Notton, DTV marketing director of MStar. “The CryptoFirewall has an impressive track record, and will help our next generation set-top box chips meet requirements for protecting against piracy and other security challenges in the pay TV space.”

The CryptoFirewall core is an on-chip, hardware-based security block that protects cryptographic keys and computations from attack. Successfully deployed in over 100 million devices, CryptoFirewall has helped eliminate signal theft in some of the world’s highest-threat environments. The CryptoFirewall core can prevent the theft of pay TV broadcast signals, simplify compliance with content owners’ anti-piracy requirements, and streamline product development.

“MStar has a proven history of delivering end-to-end semiconductor solutions for pay TV and various other consumer applications such as TV and mobile phones,” said Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist at Cryptography Research. “We are pleased to be working together with MStar to provide operators and conditional access providers with our hardware-based foundation for solving signal theft.”