Avnet Silica, an Avnet (NYSE: AVT) company, and Trusted Objects, a provider of secure firmware and security services, today announced the availability of a LoRaWANTM family of secure elements aiming to provide enhanced security and out-of-the-box provisioning for customers designing and manufacturing LoRaWANTM based products.

Building upon years of expertise in the secure transactions industry, Trusted Objects develops hardware-based security solutions for the Internet of Things. Trusted Objects’ secure firmware for LoRaWAN is built on a Secure Element to constitute a fully secure LoRaWAN modem. The secure LoRaWAN modem embeds the security functions specified in the LoRaWAN 1.0 protocol specification and provides an added layer of security by including features like secure key generation, storage and management as well as payload encryption. The solution relies on the already available TO136 secure element, the only low-power secure element in the market securing battery-powered applications without impacting their battery life.

Interfacing to the host MCU (microcontroller unit) with an I2C bus, the TO136 comes with a set of commands implementing the security transactions as described in the LoRaWANTM 1.x specification. An example stack implementation is available in source code at no additional cost.

In order to comply with all three possible provisioning cases, namely network operator specific devices, application specific devices or generic devices, the product comes with two personalisation schemes:

-  TO136-LoRaWAN-ABP for Activation by Personalisation
-  TO136-LoRaWAN-OTAA for Over-the-Air Activation

For each product, a process and key ceremony has been defined allowing any public or private LoRaWANTM operator, OEM, or end customer, to place an order and interface seamlessly with the production partner of their choice.

The TO136 secure elements are personalised in a restricted area within the European programming centre at Avnet Logistics, Poing, Germany. The personalisation infrastructure has been designed following the highly stringent banking EMVco (Europay, Visa, Mastercard) recommendations so as to offer our customers the guarantee of a state-of-the-art process.

The TO136 is available for MOQ (Minimum Order Quantities) of 1,000 units.

Guillaume Crinon, Innovation Technical Marketing Manager for security with Avnet Silica comments: “This solution completely solves the key distribution and device provisioning costs associated with the manufacturing of a LoRaWANTM connected device. Moreover, the TO136 secure element keeps the secret keys involved in a secure and safe memory for the life of the product, never exposing them to the outside world, not even to the host MCU.”

Herve? Roche, Vice-President of Marketing, Trusted Objects, adds: “Thanks to our partnership with Avnet Silica, our hardware-based security solutions are available to all developers of applications using LoRaWAN. Avnet Silica is responsible for the programing and the personalisation of the LoRaWAN family of secure elements and the delivery to systems integrators, project developers, end users, and more generally all customers interested in securing LoRaWAN applications.“

Avnet Silica and Trusted Objects introduce secure elements for LoRaWAN security