US Patent 7571320 Circuit and method for providing secure communications between devices

An electronic system and method for providing secure communications between devices. The secure communications are maintained through use of an integrity check value (ICV) that accompanies a message. The ICV is used to determine whether the contents of a message have been modified during transmission. An efficient technique for producing the ICV involves bitwise arithmetic operations and “exclusive OR” operations between data associated with the message (in its non-encrypted format) and coefficients of a matrix. The “coefficients” are selected bits from a pseudo-random data stream created by a cipher engine from keying material used in communications between the devices.