Dutch electronics firm NXP has announced a device with the flexibility, adaptability and versatility to help ensure security across multiple standards in various IoT ecosystems.

The EdgeLock A5000 is scalable for authentication applications where security is crucial throughout the product lifecycle, including many IoT use cases, as well as smart city infrastructure and connected industrial equipment.

Authentication plays an important role within IoT ecosystems, verifying device identities during secure communication, assessing whether data come from trustworthy sources, checking authenticity of product sub-components to ensure overall systems integrity, product safety and performances, or verifying the authenticity of a product or component.

The A5000 secure authenticator is optimised for authentication implementations throughout the device lifecycle, helping reduce R&D efforts, simplify manufacturing and supply-chain logistics, and comply with high-level security and ecosystem standards.

“Authentication is pivotal to establish trust in secure devices within IoT ecosystems, but at the same time, implementing it is a challenging endeavour,” said Christian Lackner, senior director of IoT security at NXP. “The EdgeLock A5000 makes the development of secure devices easy and scalable, allowing developers to focus on differentiating their IoT.”

Complementing NXP’s EdgeLock secure element family, which addresses more complex ecosystems that require multi-tenant security, updatability and crypto agility, the secure authenticator family is designed to meet the increased demand for security in authentication applications. The A5000 secure authenticator provides highly secure, Common Criteria EAL6+ AVA_VAN.5 (up to the OS) certification to enable authentication mechanisms. It is designed to work as a turnkey authentication plug-in with any type of microcontroller, microprocessor or connectivity platform, such as wifi SoC.

The A5000 supports a -40 to +105˚C temperature range, enabling it to be used in applications such as industrial equipment, smart city infrastructure components or appliances. It is accompanied by dedicated application guidelines and software examples for individual use cases, such as device authentication, cloud onboarding, inclusion in the Matter smart home ecosystem, smart metering, electric vehicle charging, Qi 1.3 wireless charging authentication, and gaming. This allows developers to focus on the application implementation while providing a secure option that can be easily scaled for different products within the ecosystem.

Furthermore, developers do not need to establish a complex and costly key management infrastructure to handle devices’ credentials when leveraging NXP secure infrastructure and services through EdgeLock 2GO. This includes EdgeLock 2GO Custom for creating custom ICs to support complex configurations or to comply with Qi 1.3 and Matter standards and EdgeLock 2GO Managed for managing credentials and multiple services, such as credential rotation, throughout the device lifecycle.