IoT Security NuMicro M2354 Series

Nuvoton's NuMicro M2354 series microcontrollers are based on Arm® Cortex®-M23. In addition to the built-in TrustZone® technology of the Armv8-M architecture, it also adds protection functions against side-channel attacks to cryptographic hardware accelerators as well as fault injection attacks of voltage and clock pin surges. Furthermore, the M2354 series has implemented the microcontroller platform security hardware features, including debug port management, product life cycle management, firmware version counter, and a secure key storage area with chip physical level security, allowing the microcontroller application system to easily realize data storage security, software execution security, and message communication security.

With its numerous power management modes, the M2354 series has excellent power consumption numbers with full flexibility. In normal run mode, it consumes 89.3 μA/MHz with LDO power supply and 39.6 μA/MHz with DC/DC power supply. The standby power-down mode consumes less than 2 μA. In deep power-down mode with VBAT power supply, it consumes 0.5 μA for 80-bytes content retention of RTC registers. It can further down to 0.1 μA if there is no need to keep the 80-bytes content of RTC registers.

The platform security architecture (PSA) launched by Arm is an IoT ecosystem security solution. This solution includes threat model analysis, security analysis, hardware and firmware architecture specifications, and open source. The firmware reference design, this solution also provides basic design principles, allowing developers to build more secure IoT devices in a more efficient way. PSA has now developed in accordance with three certification levels, namely PSA Certified™ Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3. In order to allow developers to more conveniently implement IoT security technology in innovative development, Nuvoton Technology has developed the Nuvoton Secure Microcontroller Platform (NuSMP) that supports Arm PSA. NuSMP is a security technology that mixes hardware and software to meet the security requirements of general-purpose and IoT security microcontroller series. Developers can easily implement secure designs on NuMicro® M23 line microcontrollers through NuSMP technology, including trusted boot (root of trust), secure over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates, software downloads, non-secure zone power management, and encryption and decryption software tools on the PC side. NuSMP 1.0 can comply with PSA Level 1 and Level 2 security certification, while NuSMP 2.0 imported by M2354 can also comply with PSA Level 3 or other IoT device security certification levels of the same security level.