Secure MCU for e-banking and e-identification – contact and contactless

ST microelectronics has introduced a secure microcontroller that includes a 13.56MHz RF interface for contactless operation and a serial interface for contact operation.

Called ST31P450, it is built on a 40nm flash process and is aimed at contactless and contact applications in banking, identity, transportation and pay-television. The RF interface includes an RF UART for contactless comms up to 848kbit/s compatible with ISO/IEC 14443 Type A, and there is also a serial interface compatible with the ISO/IEC 7816-3 (T=0, T=1).

At its heart is a 55MHz dual-core 32bit Arm SecurCore SC000 which meets ISO 7816 and ISO 14443 Type A smart-card and contactless standards, according to ST, and versions are available to supports Mifare libraries including Classic, Plus and DESFire. SC000 is built on Cortex M0, with additional security features to help to protect against attacks.

“ST31P450 secure microcontroller, and its associated cryptographic libraries, are expected to achieve Common Criteria EAL5+, as well as EMVCo and CUP [China UnionPay] certifications within the coming months,” said the firm.

450kbyte of flash and 10kbyte of ram is included on-die and hardware security blocks include an AES accelerator for AES-128, AES-192 and AES256 algorithms; a three-key Triple DES accelerator (EDES+) peripheral for ‘cipher block chaining’ (CBC) mode, fast DES and triple DES based on three key registers and one data register; and a NESCRYPT cryptoprocessor for public key algorithm processing with native operations up to 4,096bit.

Then there are three 16bit general-purpose timers and a watchdog timer.

Operation is over -25 to +85°C and 2.7 to 5.5V in contact mode with ISO/IEC 14443 compliance.