emSecure - The Digital Signature Suite

What is emSecure?

The digital signature suite emSecure, is a SEGGER software package that allows creation and verification of digital signatures. One important feature is that emSecure can make it impossible to create a clone of an embedded device by simply copying hardware and firmware. And it can do much more, such as securing firmware updates distributed to embedded devices and authenticating licenses, serial numbers, and sensitive data.

emSecure offers 100% protection against hacking. It is not just nice to have, but in fact a must-have, not only for critical devices such as election machines, financial applications, or sensors. Compromised devices are dangerous in several ways, not just from a commercial point of view. They hamper manufacturers' reputation and might entail severe legal disputes. Not addressing the issue of hacking and cloning is irresponsible. Based on asymmetric encryption algorithms with two keys, emSecure signatures cannot be forged by reverse engineering of the firmware.

A secure private key is used to generate the digital signature, whereas a second, public key is used to authenticate data by its signature. There is neither a way to get the private key from the public key, nor is it possible to generate a valid signature without the private key.

The emSecure source code has been created from scratch for embedded systems, to achieve highest portability with a small memory footprint and high performance. However, usage is not restricted to embedded systems. With its easy usage, it takes less than one day to add and integrate emSecure into an existing product.

emSecure is a very complete package, including ready-to-run tools and functionality for generation of keys and signatures for your embedded solution.

Advantages of emSecure

emSecure has been created from scratch to achieve highest portability and performance with a very small memory footprint. It enables you to profit from the security of digital signatures in embedded applications, even on small single-chip microcontrollers without the need of additional hardware such as external security devices or external memory.

SEGGER offers different versions of emSecure which use different signature algorithms to fit any requirement of size or speed. The structure of each version is similar to make all of them easily usable and expandable.

emSecure is a complete package. It includes ready-to-run tools to generate keys and signatures, to sign and verify data and to convert the keys and signatures into compilable formats. emSecure includes all required source code to integrate signature generation directly into your production process and data verification into your application or firmware.

emSecure has a simple yet powerful API. It can be easily integrated into an existing application within one day. emSecure incorporates proven security algorithms as proposed by NIST. The algorithms are proven to be cryptographically strong and can provide a maximum of security to your applications.

emSecure is licensed in the same way as other SEGGER middleware products and not covered by an open-source or required-attribution license. It can be integrated in any commercial or proprietary product without the obligation to disclose the combined source. It can be used royalty-free in your product.