Crypto-enabled embedded controller makes it easy to add security to IoT devices

Mouser Electronics is now stocking the CEC1302 low-power crypto-enabled embedded controller from Microchip Technology. The hardware-based cryptography suite offers significant performance improvements over firmware-based solutions. It 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. The controller features a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 processor core with 128KBytes of SRAM, 32KBytes of boot ROM, and a hardware floating point unit. It 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 device offers private key and customer programming flexibility with a full-featured microcontroller in a single-package solution in order to minimise customer risk. It provides savings in terms of power drain and also improved execution of application performance. It 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.