Secure Cryptographic Unit as Root-of-Trust for IoT Era

The Internet of Things (IoT) implicates an infrastructure that creates new value by connecting everything with communication networks, and its construction is rapidly progressing in anticipation of its great potential. Enhancing the security of IoT is an essential requirement for supporting IoT. For ensuring IoT security, it is desirable to create a situation that even a terminal component device with many restrictions in computing power and energy capacity can easily verify other devices and data and communicate securely by the use of public key cryptography. To concretely achieve the big goal of penetrating public key cryptographic technology to most IoT end devices, we elaborated the secure cryptographic unit (SCU) built in a low-end microcontroller chip. The SCU comprises a hardware cryptographic engine and a built-in access controlling functionality consisting of a software gate and hardware gate. This paper describes the outline of our SCU construction technology’s research and development and prospects. key words: IoT, security IP, public-key cryptography, root of trust