This information applies to the nRF52840 SoC only.

ARM TrustZone CryptoCell is a hardware accelerator that is available in the nRF52840 SoC. It adds hardware support for a range of security features, including advanced features that are not covered by the Cryptography library. See the nRF52840 Product Specification for detailed information about CryptoCell.

Hardware-accelerated security operations are usually faster and consume less power than the software backend that is used by the Cryptography library. However, the CryptoCell library requires hardware support and is therefore available only on the nRF52840 SoC.

The CryptoCell library supports the following cryptographic routines:

Advanced Encryption Standard
ChaCha stream cipher
Diffie-Hellman key exchange, as defined in PKCS#3 with key length 1024-bit and 2048-bit
Elliptic Curve Cryptography, supporting Edwards and Montgomery families of curves (ECC EWD and ECC MONT)
Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA)
Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH)
MD5
SHA-1
SHA-2 (SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512)
Keyed-hash message authentication codes (HMAC)
HMAC-based key derivation function (HKDF), as defined in PKCS#3
Random number generation (reference standard SP800-90)
RSA
Secure Remote Password protocol (SRP)

Using the CryptoCell library

To use CryptoCell functionality, link in the runtime library nrf_cc310. The library is available in the external\nrf_cc310\lib folder. See the CryptoCell API for an overview of available functionality.

For examples of API usage, see the Experimental: CryptoCell examples.