Experimental: CryptoCell Example

nRF5 SDK v14.1.0
This information applies to the nRF52840 SoC only.

The CryptoCell peripheral (see the nRF52840 Product Specification ) on nRF52840 SoCs provides fast and power-efficient cryptographic functionality. The Experimental: CryptoCell library provides an API to use hardware-accelerated cryptography.

To help you get started using the CryptoCell API , the SDK includes several example applications that demonstrate the use of many CryptoCells features and verify their behavior.

The following example applications are available:

Name Description
aes Demonstrates how to use the Advanced Encryption Standard.
chacha_poly Demonstrates how to use the ChaCha variant of the Salsa20 stream cipher.
ecc Demonstrates how to use Elliptic Curve Cryptopgraphy (ECC). The example shows Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) key generation, signing, and verification. CryptoCell supports the Edwards and Montgomery families of curves.
hash Demonstrates the hash capabilities of CryptoCell. The following hash algorithms are supported: MD5, SHA-1, SHA-2, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512.
hkdf Demonstrates the HMAC-based key derivation function.
hmac Demonstrates how to use keyed-hash message authentication codes.
rnd Demonstrates random number generation.
rsa Demonstrates how to generate RSA keys and how to use them for encryption and decryption.

You can find the source code and the project file of the examples in the following folder: <InstallFolder>\examples\crypto\nrf_cc310

Testing

Test the CryptoCell Example applications by performing the following steps:

  1. Navigate to the armgcc folder of the example at examples\crypto\nrf_cc310\ example_name \pca10056\blank\armgcc .
  2. Open a command prompt and type make to build the project.
  3. Use nrfjprog (from nRF5x Command Line Tools v9.2.0 or newer) to program the .hex file that was created in the _build folder to the board.
  4. Use an RTT viewer to see the log messages produced by the integration test. The messages describe the success or failure of each stage in the test in a human-readable format.