Oberon PSA Crypto version 1.0 was released on February 23, 2023. It is compatible to the latest PSA specifications and the Mbed TLS reference implementation.

First benchmarks show that API compliance with the new standard can be achieved without major loss of speed or power consumption, compared to the same crypto implementation with a proprietary API! Please see these SecureMark-TLS scores, where Oberon PSA Crypto compares favorably with all other pure software crypto implementations – even where more powerful processor cores and higher clock frequencies are being used!

There are two published benchmark scores for Oberon PSA Crypto: one without, and one with AES hardware acceleration. The latter produces slightly better scores. The difference is not large in this case, because the benchmarks are based on the use of TLS in typical IoT use cases, in a way that elliptic curve processing dominates over AES cryptography. Depending on the degree of crypto hardware acceleration that your device supports, the benefit of crypto hardware – and PSA crypto drivers for that hardware – may be more pronounced.

The SecureMark™-TLS benchmark has been developed by the vendor-neutral Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium. It is a cryptography benchmark for IoT devices that measures both energy consumption and performance of cryptographic operations, for a workload that is typical for a microcontroller running a TLS session.