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 back-door 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 MCU in a single-package solution in order to minimise 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 MCU 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 MCU. 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.
In order to quickly develop applications based on the CEC1302, use MikroElektronika’s CEC1302 Clicker (MIKROE-1970) and CEC1302 Clicker 2 (MIKROE-1969). Use these boards with MikroElektronika’s complete development toolchain for Microchip CEC1302 ARM Cortex-M4 MCUs which includes compilers, development boards, programmers/debuggers or with standard third-party ARM MCU toolchains.
The CEC1302D-SZ-C0 is available today for sampling and volume production in a 144-WFBGA package.