Microchip Technology Inc. introduced the CEC1702 hardware cryptography-enabled microcontroller. The CEC1702 addresses the increasing need for security measures, such as secure boot, driven by the continual growth of Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
The CEC1702 is a full-featured ARM® Cortex®-M4-based microcontroller with a complete hardware cryptography-enabled solution in a single package. This low-power but powerful, programmable 32-bit microcontroller offers easy-to-use encryption, authentication, private and public key capabilities and allows customer programming flexibility to minimize customer risk. The CEC1702 also provides significant performance improvements when compared to firmware-based solutions. The device’s hardware cryptographic cipher suite reduces compute time by orders of magnitude over software solutions, and, as an example, provides 20-50x performance improvement for PKE acceleration as well as 100x improvement for encryption/decryption. This robust hardware-based feature set results in applications that can run security measures quickly, effectively and with significantly lower cost and power consumption.
Key Features
- Pre-boot authentication of system firmware, providing an immutable identity and a root of trust to ensure that the firmware is untouched and hasn’t been corrupted
- Firmware update authentication: Verifying that the firmware update has not been corrupted and is from a trusted source
- Authentication of system critical commands: Attesting that any system-critical command is from a known source with authorization to make the given change, preventing potentially devastating actions
- Protection of secrets with encryption: Safeguarding code and data to prevent theft or malicious activities
Filed Under: Industrial automation