Interview with Laurent Denis, ST MCU Manager, during his visit to Korea
Secure SoC that complies with high security standards at the financial level

“It's the best solution for protecting IoT devices at an affordable price.”

Laurent Denis, Marketing Manager for STMicroelectronics' MCU division, consistently emphasized the importance of security in the IoT era. This is inevitable, as the Internet of Things, with its diverse devices and connected devices, continues to proliferate, leading to growing concerns about security breaches.

Leaks of personal and corporate information and hacking of automobiles are expected to become more common in the future. ST, which has consistently provided smart security solutions at the semiconductor level, has recently released a new security chip for use in Internet of Things devices, furthering this trend.

ST announced in June the launch of a new, easy-to-use yet powerful security chip (STSAFE-A100), which it says protects connected devices in consumer and industrial IoT environments and prevents cloning or copying of original products by verifying their authenticity.

Dennis, the product manager, highlighted that in a survey of executives from major manufacturers worldwide, about 37% of respondents were concerned about data security, 33% were concerned about privacy, and 34% were concerned about data quality. He said that if security threats like these are exposed, service providers, network access providers, and device makers will all suffer damage to their credibility, brand, and business models.

To achieve this, he noted, data must be protected and authenticated to prevent service quality degradation. This means that advanced electronic security must now be used to prevent problems such as forgery, tampering, and information theft caused by hacker intrusions, as well as product misuse. ST's new secure turnkey solution, announced today, provides authentication capabilities and can be used with standard MCUs. Furthermore, the solution boasts a high level of security, featuring a built-in secure operating system and certification to the financial-grade security industry standard (Common Criteria EAL5+).

This security chip complies with USB Type-C device authentication and utilizes Transport Layer Security (TLS) handshaking, a security protocol, to secure communications with remote hosts. It also supports NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) or Brainpool 256- and 384-bit elliptic curve cryptography, as well as symmetric encryption using AES-128/AES-256.

Dennis emphasized that the STSAFE-A100 security chip is designed to be simple and convenient, allowing customers to focus solely on application development. In other words, because it has received the highest level of security certification, design is possible even without expert-level security expertise. To this end, ST will provide customers with an ecosystem that includes expansion boards equipped with Arduino headers, MCU libraries, and implementation references.

Regarding ST's security MCU strategy, Dennis said, "ST has been providing security solutions for banking, SIM, and identity since 1990, and has been supplying embedded security since around 2015, and now we are taking a step forward into IoT security."