The world’s leading smart home device manufacturers and suppliers have joined forces to develop a global standard that eases smart home implementations. The Zigbee Alliance’s working group “Connected Home over IP”, CHIP for short, aims at increasing compatibility among smart home products, with security as a fundamental design tenet. As a world leading security solutions provider, Infineon Technologies AG (FSE: IFX / OTCQX: IFNNY) has helped to define security features in CHIP that are both easy to integrate for manufacturers and easy to use for consumers.
“We are convinced that Project CHIP as an industry-wide standardization effort has the power to boost smart home device manufacturing and deployment”, said Steve Hanna, Senior Principal at Infineon and lead of several security teams within the CHIP Working Group. “Hardware security is second to none when it comes to protecting user’s privacy and data security. We have brought in all our expertise to securely and easily connect domestic life with the internet.”
In the face of the Corona pandemic, private homes have become the center of working, educating, entertaining and even healthcare. As a result, there is greater demand for a new range of applications and functions ranging from home security to energy-efficient lighting or air conditioning. Aspects such as easy and secure in-home control and device set-up are consequently becoming fundamental for consumers’ buying decisions.
How the smart home standard CHIP works
With CHIP, consumers will experience a new degree of professionalism when adding a new device into their home networks. From design to end of life, a device’s identity can now be stored and updated in hardware-based security. Hardware-based security can eliminate the use of unsecure passwords, maintain device integrity through protected firmware updates and protect private data through state-of-the-art data encryption.
As part of the CHIP working group, Infineon has been a leader in all major security teams, including those covering topics such as cryptographic primitives for encryption, device attestation and integrity, and the requirements for security certification of smart home devices.
Comparable to the TPM standard which raised the bar for PC security, the CHIP standard aims to help smart home device manufacturers to significantly increase the level of security of their products while keeping costs controlled and avoiding needless complexity with easy-to-use hardware based security.
