SparkFun Looks to Protect Your Firmware with Its New MicroMod Teensy Processor Board
With an integrated encryption engine, this MicroMod Processor Board aims to protect your firmware — even if someone desolders the chip.
SparkFun has launched a new Teensy-based MicroMod Processor board, which brings with it a somewhat unusual feature missing from the original model: firmware copy protection, preventing it from being read back out once flashed.
"The SparkFun MicroMod Teensy Processor with Copy Protection utilizes the same hardware as the 'Lockable' Teensy from PJRC," SparkFun's Chris McCarty explains. "Entrepreneurs care about keeping their firmware from being copied by competitors and the process of permanently locking secure mode can be mentally stressful. So we updated the name to better emphasize the primary customer benefit: 'copy protection.'"
The board, which is designed to slot into a MicroMod carrier board as its processor, features the same core specifications as SparkFun's earlier MicroMod Teensy Processor: an Arm Cortex-M7 microcontroller running at 600MHz, 1MB of RAM, 16MB of flash, and connectivity including no fewer than seven hardware UARTs, four I2C buses, two SPI buses, CAN bus, and 12 general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins.
What makes the new board stand apart from the original, though, is its ability to protect the firmware with which it has been flashed. "When compiling, your program is encrypted," McCarty explains. "When run, the IMXRT Bus Encryption Engine provides on-the-fly decryption as your program executes. If an attacker removes and reads the flash memory chip from [the board], attempts to capture the USB communication from Teensy Loader, or copies the EHEX file Teensy Loader opens, they get only an encrypted copy of your program."
The new processor board is available on the SparkFun store now at $24.95 before volume discounts, a $3.45 premium over the original MicroMod Teensy Processor Board.