Cavium Networks Announces Industry's First In-line Security Processor Family.

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SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 3, 2003

Cavium's NITROX II(TM) Family of Security

Processors Delivers In-line IPsec and SSL Processing

at Performance Ranges from 2 Gbps to 10 Gbps

Cavium Networks, the cost and performance leader in security processing today announced the NITROX II(TM) family of In-line Security Macro Processors that eliminates the security processing bottleneck by providing a range of true "bump-in-the-wire" processors with performance ranging from 2 Gbps to 10 Gbps of IPsec or SSL security protocol processing. The single chip NITROX II family equipped with high performance, streaming SPI-3 and SPI-4 interfaces complements Cavium's award-winning NITROX Lite, NITROX and NITROX Plus family of security processors, which started shipping in production volumes in 2002. The NITROX II family of processors will be used in a wide range of multi-gigabit networking equipment such as routers, switches, web-servers, server load balancers, firewalls, SANs, and VPN gateways, enabling a secure and authenticated Internet (see attached Figures 1, 2 & 3).

"IPSec VPNs are mainstream, and SSL-based VPN products are starting to ship in volume, " said Jeff Wilson Executive Director, of Infonetics Research. "All types and sizes of organizations are rolling out encrypted network services. NITROX II, with its in-line functionality and wide performance range will enable networking vendors to quickly integrate cost effective, wire speed security into existing networking equipment and meet the market demand of wide-spread security deployment."

Existing security processors that off-load IPsec security protocol processing are look-aside architectures that sit off a host CPU or NPU. This look-aside architecture requires a substantial number of host processor cycles to do packet parsing, classification, lookups and management for the traffic between the host and the security processor, so the host CPU or NPU becomes the performance bottleneck. Cavium's NITROX II with its built-in capability to sit in-line between the MAC and the host processor completely off-loads security processing from the host processor and eliminates this bottleneck.

"An in-line design is a must for high-performance security processing, because the look-aside approach runs out of gas in multi-gigabit applications," noted Linley Gwennap, principal analyst of The Linley Group. "Cavium is the first vendor to build an in-line security processor and, not coincidentally, has the industry's fastest chip for both IPSec and SSL applications. Yet the flexibility and price/performance range of the NITROX II family make it well suited to a variety of security appliances, data-center equipment, networked storage devices, and edge routers."

NITROX II: Comprehensive In-line Multi-Protocol Security Processing

The NITROX II family supports a choice of industry standard, single or dual, streaming SPI-3 or SPI-4.2 interfaces, a 64-bit PCI-X bus for control and data path applications and a local 72-bit DDR SDRAM bus. These interfaces facilitate integration into both in-line and look-aside line-card and security appliance architectures. The NITROX II is a programmable processor that provides a comprehensive solution including protocol processing, symmetric, and asymmetric encryption for IPsec, SSL, iSCSI and WEP protocol based applications. The NITROX II's complete packet and protocol processing functions support both IPv4 and IPv6, packet classification, Layer 2 and IP header parsing, checksum, inbound SA lookup, fragmentation support, IPsec selector checks, and exception generation for bad IP packets, ICMP, IKE etc. NITROX II also supports extensive per SA statistics collection along with built-in high availability features like SA mirroring. The NITROX II accelerates the complete suite of standard symmetric encryption and hashing algorithms such as 3DES, AES, ARC4, SHA-1, SHA-2 and MD-5 with their multiple modes, options and key lengths at performance ranges from 2Gbps to 10Gbps. Asymmetric algorithms such as RSA, DH and DSS with key lengths up to 4096-bits are supported with a peak performance of 60K 180-bit exponent DH or 40K 1024-bit exponent RSA operations per second.

"Furthering Cavium's tradition of introducing innovative and disruptive technologies to the security market, we are proud to announce the NITROX II family of In-line Security Macro Processors," said Syed Ali, President and CEO of Cavium Networks. "Cavium's product portfolio delivers an unmatched end-to-end footprint with performance points from 50 Mbps to 10 Gbps, which meets customer needs across the entire security processing spectrum. Cavium is very well positioned to become the one-stop shop for security processors."

Cavium's NITROX II also has the ability to process multiple security protocols like IPsec, SSL and WEP simultaneously with guaranteed bandwidth reservation options to enable quality of service (QOS) applications using Internet security. Applications that require QOS include implementation of service level agreements (SLAs) by service providers, Voice plus Video over IPsec, and Storage using iSCSI.

Administration and Manageability

The NITROX II family of Security Macro Processors is a feature-rich solution that includes dedicated administrative processing resources to handle a myriad of management functions such as tamper-proof protection, error logging, statistics collection, billing information, error recovery, zeroing out of private keys, trusted path management, private key generation and primality checking. These resources dramatically ease the task of developing fully manageable FIPS 140-2 Level 1,2,3,4 compliant systems.

Complete Solution

Cavium delivers a complete security solution including chips, evaluation boards and reference software. The NITROX II evaluation board offers a choice of PCI-X, SPI-3 and SPI-4.2 interface options along-with Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. The NITROX II is supported by an array of software support utilities and applications based on open-source and third party software. The complete software suite of reference code includes drivers for Linux and popular real-time-operating-systems with chip configuration utilities, power on test tools, a modified FreeS/WAN IPsec stack and a modified OpenSSL stack integrated with open-source application software.

Product Pricing and Availability

All members of the NITROX II family are housed in a 1096 BGA package and will commence sampling in April 2003. The NITROX II family of Security Macro Processors has five members that target distinct price and performance points. The CN2130 processor supports a single SPI-3 streaming interface and delivers up to 3 Gbps of secure bandwidth or 18K DH ops/sec. The CN2240 processor supports dual SPI-3 interfaces with performance up to 6 Gbps of secure bandwidth or 36K DH ops/sec. The CN2340 processor supports dual interfaces, which includes a SPI-3 and a SPI-4.2 interface. This dual interface option also allows glueless bridging between SPI-3 and SPI-4.2 devices and is targeted at applications requiring up to 6 Gbps of secure bandwidth or 36K DH ops/sec. The CN2450 processor supports a single SPI-4.2 interface and is designed for applications requiring up to 10 Gbps of secure bandwidth or 50K DH ops/sec. The CN2560 processor supports dual SPI-4.2 interfaces supports applications requiring over 10 Gbps of secure bandwidth or 60K DH ops/sec. The power consumption ranges from 6 Watts for the NITROX 2130 to 15 Watts for the NITROX 2560. For more information, please visit http://www.cavium.com/

Product pricing at 1KU lot quantities ranges from $295 for the CN2130 to $795 for the CN2560.

The NITROX II Software Development Kit is priced at $9995.

About Cavium Networks

Cavium Networks is a semiconductor company that is delivering the industry's largest family of network security processors. Cavium's award winning NITROX family of security processors are single chip solutions that deliver 100Mbs to 10Gbps of encryption bandwidth with 1K to 50K RSA/DH operations per second. Cavium's highly integrated, feature rich NITROX families of Security Macro Processors deliver unprecedented performance in wired and wireless IPsec based network security applications and SSL based secure e-Business while significantly reducing the cost and complexity of deployment. Cavium Networks is headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley in Santa Clara, CA with an IC design center in Marlboro, MA. For more information, please visit: http://www.cavium.com

Attachments

--------------------- ------------------------------------------------
                                        Description
--------------------- ------------------------------------------------
Figures 1, 2 & 3      NITROX II(TM) Block Diagrams
                      (Cavium_NITROX-II.pdf, 117KB)
--------------------- ------------------------------------------------

    Glossary of terms

--------------------- ------------------------------------------------
        Term                             Definition
--------------------- ------------------------------------------------
AES                   Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).  A
                       cryptographic algorithm to succeed DES
--------------------- ------------------------------------------------
ARC4                  A cryptographic algorithm
--------------------- ------------------------------------------------
DES / 3DES            Data Encryption Standard cryptographic
                       algorithms
--------------------- ------------------------------------------------
DH                    A key agreement algorithm published by Whitfield
                       Diffie and Martin Hellman
--------------------- ------------------------------------------------
FIPS 140-2            Federal Information Processing Standard for
                       security requirements
--------------------- ------------------------------------------------
IPsec                 IP security protocol
--------------------- ------------------------------------------------
RSA                   Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA). An algorithm for
                       asymmetric cryptography
--------------------- ------------------------------------------------
SA                    Security Association, used in IPsec security
                       protocol
--------------------- ------------------------------------------------
SSL                   Secure Socket Layer. An Internet protocol for
                       web security
--------------------- ------------------------------------------------
VPN                   Virtual Private Network
--------------------- ------------------------------------------------

Note to Editors: Product photos, datasheets and application notes are available upon request. NITROX(TM) is a trademark of Cavium Networks, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.

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