“Microchip Technology Inc., a leading provider of microcontroller, mixed-signal, analog and Flash-IP solutions, today announced a new hardware crypto-enabled 32-bit microcontroller. The CEC1302’s hardware-based cryptography suite offers significant performance improvements over firmware-based solutions. The CEC1302 makes it easy to add security to Internet of Things (IoT) devices, offering easy-to-use encryption and authentication for programming flexibility and increased levels of security. Security threats are increasing exponentially in terms of frequency, targeted devices, malignancy and costs of attacks. The CEC1302 allows for pre-boot authentication of the system firmware in order to ensure that the firmware is untouched and uncorrupted, thereby preventing security attacks such as man-in-the-middle, denial-of-service and backdoor vulnerabilities. It can also be used to authenticate any firmware updates, protecting the system from malware or memory corruption.”