Secure key provisioning is putting secret information into ICs at a protected facility. Aimed at companies that do not want to handle their own provisioning, TrustFlex is Microchip’s mid-tier secure provisioning service, for 2,000 units and upwards. The most flexible tier starts at 4,000 units, and the least flexible at 10.
The three ICs are secure storage devices, in 8pad and 3pad packages, designed to be used alongside microcontrollers or microprocessors to keep secret keys hidden from hacking attacks – they implement trusted authentication to assist maintaining the confidentiality and authenticity of data and communications.
“As part of the TrustFlex platform, ECC204, SHA104 and SHA105 ICs are pre-configured with defined use cases, customisable cryptographic keys and code examples to streamline the development process,” according to the company. “ECC20x and SHA10x devices meet Common Criteria Joint Interpretation Library [JIL] high rated secure key storage requirements and have been certified by the NIST Entropy Source Validation [ESV] and Cryptographic Algorithm Validation Program [CAVP] in compliance with the Federal Information Processing Standard [FIPS].”
The ECC204 is also approved by the Wireless Power Consortium as a Qi authentication SSS (secure storage subsystem).
For development, ECC20x and SHA10x ICs are supported by Microchip’s ‘Trust platform design suite’, which is where the code examples and learning materials come from, and it “enables the secure transfer of credentials to more easily leverage Microchip’s secure key provisioning services”, said the company.
The devices are also supported by the company’s MPLAB X IDE, evaluation boards and its CryptoAuthLib library.
Informative ECC20x backgrounder video on YouTube, and similar for SH10x – the first starts with a general introduction to authentication.
