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NXP Brings Advanced Security to Banking and Secure Identity Contact Markets
November 2013 by Marc Jacob
NXP Semiconductors N.V. launched its new SmartMX2-P40 platform of chip card microcontrollers for large-scale projects in the rapidly growing banking and electronic-Government (eGov) markets. Global concerns about identity theft, fraud and privacy continue to grow as individuals conduct their daily lives in an increasingly interconnected world, leading financial and governmental organizations to continuously augment their efforts to safeguard individual data. The SmartMX2-P40 has a new powerful RISC MRK3-SC core and meets common criteria EAL5+ level certification via NXP’s world-renowned IntegralSecurityTM architecture. Uncompromising on performance and security, the new platform has been optimized for mass market chip card projects, effectively balancing the provision of more secure cards with the overall project investment.
Chip cards, already extensively used in government ID cards, have become more pervasive in applications such as health cards and driving licenses as the overall cost of employing the technology has stabilized. At the same time, there is a constant need to introduce new protection measures to stay in line with evolving security requirements. NXP’s SmartMX2-P40 offers dedicated co-processors for asymmetric RSA/ECC and symmetric DES/AES cryptography, and comes equipped with a certified hardware abstraction layer (HAL) and crypto library for fast time-to-market. An ISO/IEC 7816 contact interface ensures that the SmartMX-P40 can be used in existing chip card infrastructures.
Using an embedded secure microcontroller to safeguard data, chip cards have long been proven to drive down fraud and protect identity. To protect against identity theft, governments began issuing chip cards for identification, health insurance and social security purposes. In the financial sector, credit and debit chip cards have reduced fraud by over 70%. Well over five billion chip cards are now in circulation globally, the majority of which are contact only. The new SmartMX2-P40 complements the SmartMX family by providing a highly secure platform dedicated to the needs of contact smart card projects and their end customers
