Page 30 - EngineerIT June 2022

ELECTRONIC

New real-time for a quick adoption of the latest security
advances and standards.
Microchip’s CEC1736 Trust Shield
platform root of trust family spans silicon, software, tools, a

development board and provisioning
capabilities that drive the end-to-end
Microchip’s Trust Shield family provides an end-to-end solution for protecting platform firmware protection that
data centre, telecommunication and networking systems against rapidly customers need.
Security is an issue of business
evolving security threats
continuity, consumer privacy and national
security, so it’s everyone’s responsibility
s the market need for security evolves, platforms must also evolve quickly to to ensure it’s protected,” said Frédéric
defend against cyber attacks during start-up, real-time and system updates. With Thomas, chief technology officer of
Athese new market threats, designers cannot assume the equipment they are using Kudelski IoT, a leading IoT security expert.
is trustworthy and they must start looking to new technology to secure their systems. “Microchip has taken important measures
Microchip Technology Inc has announced its fully configurable microcontroller-based to ensure the CEC1736 Trust Shield family
CEC1736 Trust Shield family, which solves this challenge by going beyond NIST 800-193 is robust against advanced attack methods,
platform firmware resilience guidelines, with runtime firmware protection that anchors the by working with us to have their hardware
secure boot process, while establishing an entire chain of trust for the system platform. independently assessed in our advanced
The CEC1736 solution extends Microchip’s offering for ensuring the cyber resilience security labs. This should give Microchip
of end equipment. It is a fully configurable real-time platform root of trust that enables customers peace of mind that they are
runtime firmware protection in the SPI flash and I2C/SMBus filtering against runtime working with a secure, state-of-the-art
attacks. The attestation feature provides trustworthy evidence to ensure that critical microcontroller that contributes to the
devices in the platform are authentic. Life cycle management and ownership transfer overall security of the connected world.”
features protect secrets throughout the end product life cycle and during the transfer
of product ownership, allowing different operators to use the system platform securely Development tools
without compromising information. Microchip’s easy-to-use development
“The presumption of equipment trustworthiness is no longer acceptable, and it is tools for the CEC1736 Trust Shield family
imperative to both expect and guard against unauthorised firmware components while also start with the trust platform design suite
distrusting peripheral components until proven trustworthy,” said Ian Harris, vice president (TPDS), a graphical user interface (GUI)
of Microchip’s computing product business unit. “Our CEC1736 Trust Shield family provides configurator for exploring capabilities,
a complete solution to these challenges that simplifies development and provisioning of defining the security configuration and
keys and other secrets, while speeding time to market and providing the flexibility to stay provisioning secrets for prototyping
ahead of threats.” and production. Microchip’s MPLAB®
The CEC1736 Trust Shield family’s advanced hardware crypto cipher suite is equipped Harmony, a fully integrated embedded
with AES-256, SHA-512, RSA-4096, ECC with key size up to 571 bits and elliptic curve digital software development framework,
signature algorithm (ECDSA) with a 384-bit key length. simplifies device setup, library
The 384-bit hardware physically unclonable function (PUF) enables a unique root key selection and application development.
and symmetric secret and private key generation and protection. The advanced root of trust Other support includes the CEC1736
and security solution, which meets the NIST 800-193 and OCP security guidelines, allows Development Board.

Availability
The CEC1736 Trust Shield family is
available now, including the CEC1736
96MHz Arm® Cortex®-M4-based
microcontroller in 84-pin WFBGA package.
The family also includes Microchip’s
proven Soteria-G3 firmware, the CEC1736
development board and Microchip’s
TPDS for configuring, provisioning and
programming the part. n

Microchip is represented in South Africa
by Altron Arrow. For more details
email Andrew Athanasiou at
aathanasiou@arrow.altech.co.za

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