Hardware cryptography-enabled MCU provides security measures

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 minimise 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 by providing, for example, a 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.

Whether it is being used as a security coprocessor or a standalone microcontroller, the CEC1702 delivers a multi-dimensional defence against attacks, including:  

• Pre-boot authentication of system firmware: Providing an immutable identity and a root of trust to ensure that the firmware is untouched and has not 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 authorisation to make the given change, preventing potentially devastating actions

• Protection of secrets with encryption: Safeguarding code and data to prevent theft or malicious activities

Microchip simplifies the addition of authentication and encryption to connected designs by offering a full development suite including hardware and software tools as well as peripheral libraries and crypto. The CEC1702Q-B1- SX is in production volume.