GMO GlobalSign announced Tuesday technology alliance with Big Good Intelligent Systems, through the launch of Big Good’s new product G-Shield. G-Shield is an integrated circuit (IC) chip programmer that enables manufacturers to directly and physically write digital certificates into semiconductor IC chips.
G-Shield secures the identity of smart products from the very origin of their existence – at the component level – for use throughout the device’s lifecycle. G-Shield uses GlobalSign’s IoT Identity Platform for a secure, PKI-based framework and IoT Edge Enroll enrollment software to provision certificates individually or in batches.
Big Good pursues encryption security solutions for smart homes and the Internet in the global market by partnering with the overseas business of Atte, a company established under O-film Group in Shenzhen, China, for the purpose of expanding the smart home business. Big Good provides ideal services to satisfy the needs of the customers by utilizing big data and the features of smart homes that realize safe and comfortable daily lives.
GlobalSign’s technology expertise and developer friendly API facilitated the integration, helping Big Good launch its G-Shield product faster than anticipated. Big Good uses G-Shield to provision digital certificates into IC chips, which the company refers to as ‘crypto chips’ for its own smart home products as well as makes the crypto chips available to smart product manufacturers looking for secure ICs to build into its smart products.
The G-Shield chip programmer is also available to chip manufacturers interested in securing their own types of security chips set by customized software.
The first company planning to implement G-Shield is Realtek Semiconductor Corporation, a global provider of an integrated circuit for communications networks, computer peripherals, and multimedia applications.
Realtek Semiconductor is working with GlobalSign and Big Good to research and embed G-Shield technology in its production process to improve the security of their high-performance connected devices and products.
GlobalSign’s next-generation IoT Identity Platform delivers exceptional device identity security. The Platform is flexible and scalable enough to issue and manage billions of identities for IoT devices of all types and integrates simply with developer friendly, RESTful APIs.
Using Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) as the core identity mechanism, the IoT Identify Platform can serve the varied security use-cases of the IoT across all verticals, including semiconductor, manufacturing, agriculture, smart grid, payments, IoT gateways, healthcare, other industrial ecosystems and more.
The platform supports the full device identity lifecycle, from initial certificate provisioning (both greenfield birth certificates during manufacturing and local, brownfield identity deployments) to certificate lifecycle management and final sunsetting, including decommissioning or transfer of ownership. Giving each device or endpoint a unique identity allows them to get authenticated when they come online and then throughout their lifetime, prove their integrity, and securely communicate with other devices, services, and users.
IoT Edge Enroll is a full-fledged enrollment client used to provision and manage PKI-based identities to IoT devices of all types. IoT Edge Enroll provides a flexible and scalable way to deploy these identities and maintain them throughout the full device lifecycle, with added features such as device Registration Authority (RA), certificate lifecycle management and expanded protocol support. GlobalSign can issue certificates at unprecedented speed and volume – more than 3,000 per second – the fastest in the CA industry.
“Working with Big Good and Realtek is an exciting venture. With our certificates embedded directly into chips this should be a leap forward for semiconductors and the OEMs that buy them,” said Lancen LaChance, vice president, IoT Solutions, GlobalSign. “The opportunity to work with semiconductor makers is another important stepping stone for GlobalSign, which underscores our value and leadership in the IoT device security marketplace.”
“As smart IoT technologies advance, it is increasingly important that security be part of the design from the very beginning,” said Roger Wu, chief executive officer, Big Good Intelligent Systems. “Security should start at the component level (chips) and be supported by a strong, stable and secure PKI infrastructure at the device, gateway and cloud layers. GlobalSign’s easy API, collaborative approach and secure IoT identity Platform enables us to be first-to-market in delivering our security solution from chip to cloud.”
