[June 20, 2012]

Mocana Secures Freescale's New ZigBee Smart Energy 2.0 Platform

Mocana, a leader in smart device security, today announced that its NanoCrypto™ device cryptographic engine is being used by Freescale (News - Alert) Semiconductor to provide security for its new Kinetis® wireless solutions for ZigBee® Smart Energy Version 2.0. Already a Mocana customer, Freescale chose the Mocana (News - Alert) NanoCrypto software for its new SE 2.0 project because it provided the easiest integration with their existing ZigBee Smart Energy Profile stack for the newly announced Kinetis KW-20 wireless MCU, while offering super-fast performance even in the resource-constrained environments common to embedded implementations.

"The enhanced security features that are part of ZigBee Smart Energy 2.0 require fast and efficient key generation, especially when you have limited memory and processing resources that are typical in embedded applications," said Bruno Baylac, director of Freescale's metering, medical & connectivity division. "We looked at several open-source solutions but only Mocana was able to offer us the mix of performance and features we wanted."

ZigBee Smart Energy is the world's leading standard for interoperable products that monitor, control, inform and automat the delivery and use of energy and water. The ZigBee Smart Energy Profile specification uses elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) for the dynamic establishment of security keys between communicating nodes. This key establishment provides very robust security, which is essential to protecting devices participating in smart grid networks, for the utility and in the home.

Freescale is using the elliptic curve cryptography library in Mocana NanoCrypto for its ZigBee Smart Energy 2 software stack, which runs on their Kinetis MCUs, including their new KW20 wireless MCU, to quickly generate the encryption keys used to secure communications between two ZigBee nodes.

"We are pleased to be extending our relationship with Freescale Semiconductor into their ZigBee Smart Energy initiative and by their confidence in our security software," said Adrian Turner (News - Alert), CEO at Mocana. "Our NanoCrypto solution is, quite simply, one of the smallest, fastest and most comprehensive cryptographic cores on the market, and we are excited at the prospect of having it provide security for tens of millions of ZigBee Smart Energy devices and consumer appliances around the world."

According to analysts at Pike Research (News - Alert), the global market for smart energy devices and appliances is projected to reach $26.1 billion by 2019, and they anticipates that ZigBee will lead in wireless connections to smart appliances on home area networks.

About Mocana

Launched in 2004 and recognized by the World Economic Forum as a 2012 Technology Pioneer, Mocana provides the only device-independent security platform that secures all aspects of mobile and smart connected devices, as well as the apps and services that run on them. Mocana's solutions dramatically increase confidence and compliance for the enterprise, OEMs, service providers and their customers. Millions of people use products sold by the more than 200 companies that rely on Mocana's solutions, including Cisco, Honeywell, Dell (News - Alert) GE and General Dynamics, as well as four of the top five Android handset makers. For more information, visit www.mocana.com.

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