Silicon Labs officially became the world’s first silicon innovator to achieve PSA Certified’s highest level of IoT hardware and software security protection. PSA Certified – a respected security body for the Internet of Things (IoT) hardware, software and devices co-founded by Arm – awarded PSA Certified Level 3 status to Silicon Labs’ EFR32MG21, a wireless SoC with Secure Vault.
This milestone achievement cements Silicon Labs as the leader in securing the IoT from bad actors. Secure Vault, which delivers the stringent security software and PUF hardware requirements as defined by PSA Certified Level 3, greatly reduces the risk of IoT ecosystem security breaches and the compromise of intellectual property or revenue loss from counterfeiting. Specifically, Secure Vault technology:
Protects against scalable local and remote software attacks; Defends against local hardware attacks, which – although historically less common than software attacks – are on the rise due to the surge of affordable and easily accessible tools; Passes testing from independent third-party laboratories that attempt to infringe security functions for a specified amount of time with sophisticated equipment
Launched in 2020, Secure Vault is an award-winning suite of state-of-the-art features designed to help connected device manufacturers address escalating and ever-evolving IoT security threats and regulatory pressures. Secure Vault includes its own security core with its own ROM, RAM, and Flash containing core crypto algorithms and True Random Number Generator (TRNG) functions, as well as secure key management and storage, physical tamper protection, as well as a secure identity created by the chip itself at manufacture and anchored by a Silicon Labs root certificate chain. In 2020, Secure Vault achieved PSA Certified Level 2 status and was awarded a 2020 LEAP Awards gold medal for connectivity. Secure Vault also earned ioXt Alliance SmartCert certification for its strong IoT security protection. In October 2020, the ioXt Alliance selected PSA Certified as a foundational Root of Trust scheme in its certification program.
The PSA Certified program was co-founded by Arm in 2017 to provide a clear framework for securing connected devices, from analysis to security assessment and certification. The framework provides standardized resources to resolve the growing fragmentation of IoT requirements and remove security as a barrier to product development. PSA Certified offers three levels of security assurance, with PSA Certified Level 3 demonstrating a significant commitment to device security. At PSA Certified Level 3, silicon vendors need to meet requirements on a complex protection profile that covers substantial protection from a range of sophisticated software and physical IoT attack vectors.
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