ATECC608A CryptoAuthentication™ Device

Microchip's CryptoAuthentication Device is a trusted and secure authentication solution for Google IoT Core and AWS IoT

The ATECC608A CryptoAuthentication device from Microchip Technology integrates elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) security protocol with elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA). ECDH is an ultra-secure method to provide key agreement for encryption/decryption. ECDSA is sign-verify authentication for the Internet of Things (IoT) market, including home automation, industrial networking, and medical, as well as accessories and consumables authentication and more.

Securing communication with a Cloud service and manipulating keys comes with many challenges and storing and using keys in the microcontroller exposes them: operating systems and software have bugs; the Heartbleed bug for OpenSSL was notable by easily exposing keys. Consequently, governments and corporations across the globe are working to protect individual identities and privacy. Strong authentication is the start of robust security. This leads Cloud providers to push towards hardware-based security to obtain strong device identity protection to prevent identity spoofing, but also to protect against unauthorized firmware updates and prevent proliferation. In addition, the ATECC608A offer an integrated AES hardware accelerator strengthening hardware based security for LoRaWAN applications and enable secure boot capabilities for very small microcontrollers.

With ECDH and ECDSA being built right in, this device is ideal for the rapidly growing IoT market by easily supplying the full range of security such as confidentiality, data integrity, and authentication to systems with MCU or MPUs running encryption/decryption algorithms. Like all Microchip CryptoAuthentication products, the ATECC608A employs ultra-secure hardware-based cryptographic key storage and cryptographic countermeasures which eliminate potential backdoors linked to software weaknesses. The device is agnostic of any microprocessor (MPU) or microcontroller (MCU) and compatible with Microchip AVR®/Arm® MCUs or MPUs. As with all CryptoAuthentication devices, the ATECCC608A delivers extremely low power consumption, requires only a single GPIO over a wide voltage range, and has a tiny form factor making it ideal for a variety of IoT applications that require longer battery life and flexible form factors.