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The new trend of international trade! Recently, according to foreign media reports, the European Union released a draft of stricter cybersecurity rules, the "Cyber Resilience Act" (Cyber Resilience Act). The draft says that a range of internet-connected devices, such as smart refrigerators and TVs, will strictly comply with EU cybersecurity rules or risk being fined or banned from the market.

The news shows that once the draft is passed, the new regulations will take effect in 2024. The draft shows that due to the increasing vulnerability of current software and hardware products to cyberattacks, the loss caused by global cyberattacks in 2021 has reached 550 million euros. The cybersecurity of these "Internet of Things" products is a concern, with data showing that only half of the companies involved have adequate protection against cyberattacks.

The draft stipulates that manufacturers of IoT products, including smart homes, must obtain mandatory certificates to prove that they meet the basic needs of network security and can minimize the risk of attacks. Manufacturers that do not comply will be fined up to 15 million euros or 2.5% of the previous year's global turnover, whichever is higher.

According to the document, manufacturers must assess the cybersecurity risks of their products, and once a problem is discovered, it must notify the EU cybersecurity agency ENISA of the incident within 24 hours and take steps to resolve it. In addition, importers and distributors are also required to verify that products comply with EU rules.

In recent years, China's smart home development has been in full swing, and a large number of smart home manufacturers have emerged. From the perspective of terminal manufacturers, Haier Zhijia, Midea, Ou Ruibo, Aqara, Chuangmi, etc. These smart home manufacturers have also driven a large number of upstream suppliers. , including related SoCs, MCUs, middleware, communication modules, etc.

Due to the early development of smart home, the penetration rate is high, and the consumption is also high in Europe, which is a must for domestic smart home manufacturers for international trade exports. According to data, the European smart home market has gradually expanded since 2017, and it is expected that the market revenue will reach 45 billion US dollars (about 313.4 billion yuan) by 2025.

The new trend of international trade! Now the EU will strengthen the supervision of data security, which will be a wake-up call for relevant domestic manufacturers. Especially when the trend of home intelligence is becoming more and more obvious, more and more attention will be paid to smart home information security. Now the new EU regulations have emerged, so that relevant companies have to pay attention to this.

According to the author's knowledge, many IoT device manufacturers did not pay much attention to information security in the past, mainly because information security did not have a strong perception of users, but the cost of the manufacturers themselves increased significantly, so they were not willing to spend on information security. too much energy.

The new trend of international trade! In addition, once the encryption program is built into these smart homes, it will affect the operation and response speed of the product, so that no manufacturer is willing to take the initiative to protect information security.

However, with the increasing emphasis on information security in China and the emergence of new EU regulations, this pattern may be broken, and information security will become the standard for smart homes. And this change will also benefit many information security chip related products.

At present, there are some MCUs in the market that can realize the security authentication function, such as the NS3300 series of National Technology, which can assist users to perform operations such as identification or accessory authentication, and the chip reaches the EAL4+ security level.

Huada Electronics launched the ultra-low power security chip CIU98_D that supports the national secret algorithm. It has EAL4+ security certification and commercial secret two-level certification. It supports the device host and client to adopt safe symmetric and asymmetric authentication operations, effectively protecting keys and users. The security of private data such as sensitive information provides better security protection for terminal devices and IoT applications from the hardware layer.

In addition, there are similar security chip design companies such as Fangcun Microelectronics, Apex, Suzhou Guoxin, Renajie, Ziguang Tongxin, Hualan Micro, Huayi Micro and so on.

There are also OPTIGA™ Trust M security chips such as the international manufacturer Infineon, which can provide a secure communication feature, support TLS and DTLS protocols to prevent eavesdropping, tampering and message forgery, and the chip also provides one-way authentication. Devices or servers can easily authenticate new accessories or spare parts.

Today, one of the biggest pain points of smart home information security is the lack of industry standards, and security protection must first have standards. Without standards or standards that can truly lead and guide the entire industry, it is difficult to truly achieve the purpose of protection. The promotion of the new EU regulations will also force the smart home manufacturers of international trade companies to accelerate the establishment of information security standards.