Tongxin Micro's Automotive SE Solutions Ensure Safe Mobility

After over a century of transformation, automobiles have evolved from simple transportation tools into intelligent mobile spaces. The waves of electrification and connectivity are surging, and China's smart vehicle industry is accelerating into a fast lane of development. According to estimates from the National Development and Reform Commission, by 2025, the penetration rate of smart vehicles in China will reach 82%, with 28 million vehicles on the road. By 2030, this is expected to rise to 95%, which would be around 38 million vehicles.

A convenient, comfortable, and green automotive ecosystem is taking shape, with autonomous driving, smart cockpits, and other mobility experiences becoming integral to our future lives.

However, under the vision of smart mobility, safety remains the foundation for smart vehicles and must not be overlooked.

What Security Threats Do Smart Vehicles Face?

1. Physical flashing to implant unintended functions and unauthorized access to in-vehicle networks, compromising backend system security

2. Unencrypted MCU firmware stored on the external FLASH, leading to unauthorized access to communication keys

3. Identical communication keys used across all in-vehicle T-Boxes, creating significant security risks

4. Spoofing communication between the cloud and central control to gain root privileges

5. Bypassing gateway integrity checks to perform illegal operations such as unlocking doors or braking

In recent years, incidents like remote contactless intrusions, persistent root vulnerabilities in hosts, and flaws in OEM key encryption methods have posed risks to both user information and personal safety. Addressing security, reliability, and anti-tampering issues in vehicle connectivity to ensure the safety and controllability of connected smart vehicles has long been a challenge for the industry.

Building a Trusted Environment Based on Tongxin Micro's Security Chips

The complex system capabilities powering smart vehicles are built upon robust hardware chips, which are crucial to eliminating the above security issues. As a leader in security chips, Tongxin Micro focuses on the automotive cybersecurity sector of smart vehicles, providing a series of automotive safety chip solutions. These solutions ensure secure storage, identity authentication, robust security algorithms, and safe communication between IoT devices and cloud services, delivering end-to-end protection.

Advantages of Tongxin Micro's Automotive SE Product

1. AEC-Q100 Grade2 certification: Ensures long-term stable operations of the vehicle under harsh environments.

2. 500,000 erase/write cycles on the NVM, 25 years of data retention: Offers long-lasting and reliable service.

3. International CC EAL6+/IT EAL4+/Chinese Cryptography Level 2: Provides high-level security for key storage.

4. True random number generator for key generation: Ensures key randomness and mitigates weak key risks.

5. Key operations performed internally on the chip: Prevents key leakage risks.

6. Secure OS platform: Ensures the security and controllability of key usage permissions.

In addition, the entire chip series supports mainstream international and Chinese encryption algorithms and is compatible with SPI, IIC, 7816, and other interface protocols. It features high integration, compact packaging, low power consumption, and many other characteristics. The smart vehicle SE solutions based on this chip series have been adopted by several well-known automotive manufacturers and have received positive market feedback.

Typical Market-Recognized Cases

1. Digital Car Key

This solution includes the vehicle-side security module and car key card, offering a complete automotive-grade solution that supports digital key applications such as pre-installed Bluetooth, UWB, and NFC. It provides a secure and convenient vehicle infotainment connectivity experience and has been adopted by dozens of OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers for mass production and vehicle installation.

2. T-Box/OBD

This solution encrypts and signs transmitted data, while decrypting and verifying received data. It ensures secure vehicle-to-cloud-platform and vehicle-to-authentication-platform data transmission and authentication. 

3. eUICC

With a large user space, standard MFF2 packaging, and EAL4+ certification for both hardware and software, this solution offers automotive manufacturers a more secure and flexible Internet of Vehicles (IoV) option. It supports functions such as downloading, activating, and deleting operator profiles through connection with the operator's SM-DP+. With full-process control of the chip, from production and testing to packaging, and AEC-Q100 certification, it meets the high-quality standards required for automotive-grade eUICC.

4. OBU-ESAM

This solution has obtained the Ministry of Transport's multi-logic channel OBESAM module test report for electronic toll collection, making it suitable for the pre-installation of OBU applications.

In addition to digital car keys, T-Box, eUICC, and OBU-ESAM, this solution is also applicable to other automotive electronics fields, including V2X and China VI-compliant OBD. Its exceptional performance and market results have earned broad recognition from leading domestic and international automotive manufacturers and industry alliances.

Looking at the "14th Five-Year Plan" and the global automotive industry landscape, Chinese brands urgently need high-quality, domestically produced automotive-grade security chips. "Leveraging over 20 years of experience in financial-grade security R&D, Tongxin Micro has proactively developed automotive security chips," said Zou Zhongren, Vice President of Marketing at Tongxin Micro. "We are collaborating with our partners to create more secure and reliable automotive SE solutions to safeguard the growing ecosystem of smart automotive applications. We also hope to work with the industry chain to explore the future with the power of technology and drive the development of the global automotive industry."