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 - nrf_crypto. 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 - nrf_crypto. 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 in the runtime library.

Note: In nRF5 SDK, the CC310 functionality is most commonly used through the nrf_crypto APIs. See Cryptography library - nrf_crypto.