Microsemi bolstered the cyber security capabilities of its flagship FPGAs - SmartFusion2 and IGLOO2 - with Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) technology licensed from Intrinsic-ID. With this hardened technology as part of Microsemi's devices, system architects and designers now have an ultra-secure solution they can rely on when developing a wide range of applications for the Internet of Things (IoT).
The PUF technology is implemented by Microsemi using dedicated on-chip SRAM, and is analogous in many ways to a fingerprint or biometric signature of the FPGA, being uniquely formed on each individual silicon chip as it is being manufactured.
By defining a hardened design with dedicated SRAM and additional countermeasures such as an anti-tamper mesh and dedicated PUF power control, Microsemi achieved a much higher level of resistance to tampering than can be obtained using FPGA soft IP or software-based solutions. When the power is switched off to the PUF, the secret key effectively disappears from the chip. There is no known technology that can read the PUF's secret while its power is off.
A key aspect of cyber security as it relates to the IoT is during operation, positive identification is essential for legitimate machines to be able to authenticate each other so they can perform secure machine-to-machine (M2M) communication as part of the IoT, while rejecting data from imposters and malicious systems.
In combination with an elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) engine, designed to be resistant to differential power analysis (DPA) attacks, the integrated PUF/ECC security features can be used to generate a public-private key pair where only the SmartFusion2 or IGLOO2 device knows the private portion of the key pair.
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