1 Introduction

Modern automotive and industrial products, from cars and trains to servo drives and server power supply units, have grown in complexity, requiring real-time control solutions with higher performance. At the same time, these products have become highly connected, requiring strong cybersecurity solutions to maintain the confidentiality, integrity, authenticity and availability of hardware and software assets and the systems built around them. Additionally, the security of the application during runtime has come into greater focus, with larger and more complex software stacks leading to increased attack surfaces for potential threat actors.

To effectively defend against increasingly sophisticated modern attacks on embedded hardware and software, a comprehensive multi-layered approach is required, effectively establishing a root of trust, providing secure storage for critical assets such as cryptographic keys, creating trusted execution environments for performing security-sensitive operations, secure key and code provisioning, and run-time context isolation and memory protection to mitigate the potential reach of malware in the system. This white paper examines these subjects, and how secure microcontroller architectures can maximize these cybersecurity objectives without compromising performance.