Cryptography Research, a division of Rambus, and Riscure have announced the certification of Broadcom’s set-top box silicon under the Differential Power Analysis (DPA) countermeasure validation programme. The analysis, conducted by security evaluation firm Riscure, validates the effectiveness of DPA countermeasures to protect quality content distribution in set-top box products utilising the Broadcom BCM7538 SoC.

“Implementing effective countermeasures to DPA is important to enable a secure foundation for content distribution,” said Dan Marotta, Broadcom executive vice president and general manager, Broadband Communications Group. “We will continue to leverage our engineering expertise to be first to market and industry leader in providing secure set-top box home networking technology to our customers and partners.”

Cryptography Research licenses DPA countermeasure technologies to protect devices against side channel attacks that can extract cryptographic keys and other sensitive data from chips in set-top boxes and other home networking products. The need to integrate more comprehensive security solutions in set-top boxes has emerged as basic content protection solutions sometimes fail to thwart today’s advanced piracy techniques. Broadcom is the first semiconductor company to provide these new DPA countermeasures across its line of set-top box SoCs.

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