Microchip Technology announced a new hardware crypto-enabled 32-bit microcontroller. The CEC1302’s hardware-based cryptography suite offers significant performance improvements over firmware-based solutions. The CEC1302 makes it easy to add security to Internet of Things (IoT) devices, offering easy-to-use encryption and authentication for programming flexibility and increased levels of security.
Security threats are increasing exponentially in terms of frequency, targeted devices, malignancy and costs of attacks. The CEC1302 allows for pre-boot authentication of the system firmware in order to ensure that the firmware is untouched and uncorrupted, thereby preventing security attacks such as man-in-the-middle, denial-of-service and backdoor vulnerabilities. It can also be used to authenticate any firmware updates, protecting the system from malware or memory corruption.
The CEC1302 offers private key and customer programming flexibility with a full-featured microcontroller in a single-package solution in order to minimize customer risk. The device provides savings in terms of power drain and also improved execution of application performance.
In addition, since the CEC1302 is a full 32-bit microcontroller with an ARM Cortex-M4 core, adding security functionality only results in a small additional cost. The CEC1302 can be used as a standalone security coprocessor or can replace an existing microcontroller. The hardware-enabled public key engine of the device is also 20 to 50 times faster than firmware-enabled algorithms, and the hardware-enabled hashing is 100 times faster.
