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21 | 21 | Want to Avoid Counterfeiting? Choose the Right Secure Authentication Method for Your Design By Christine Young, Blogger, Maxim Integrated Any reputable company that cares about its customers, brand, and reputation wants to protect its products from being copied or cloned. Yet counterfeit electronic goods continue to persist, costing industries billions of dollars a year. There are, for example, estimates that the gray market gobbles up around eight percent of the total market revenue for electronics components. Unfortunately, there isn't one magic solution that provides long- lasting, impenetrable security. But while nefarious forces work to stay ahead of their deterrents, those on the good side of the law have authentication technologies in their own arsenals. There are, of course, different levels of effective authentication. Take printer ink cartridges, for example. To validate that it's genuine, a cartridge could send out a password. But the drawback to this approach is that someone in the middle could catch the password while it's being transmitted and reuse it. Challenge-response authentication, where the cartridge could prove that it knows a secret without disclosing it, presents a better option. There are two different crypto-algorithm types to consider: Symmetric keys (or secret keys) and asymmetric keys (or public keys). Let's take a closer look at each type. Symmetric Keys for Authentication Symmetric keys have these characteristics: • The host and slave must operate from the same secret key • The secret must be protected from disclosure attack on both sides • There's support for bidirectional authentication • For a comparable security level, there's less algorithm complexity and shorter computation time 3.3V SCL SDA V CC GND µC R P I 2 C PORT DS28C22 Figure 1: Maxim's DS28C22 DeepCover Secure Authenticator protects embedded designs, peripherals, and sensors with bidirectional challenge-and-response SHA-256 authentication and encryption. (Source: Maxim Integrated)

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