Swiss cybersecurity and IoT solutions company WISKey International Ltd (SIX: WIHN) participated in Hannover Messe 2018, the world’s leading trade fair in industrial technology, held between April 23 and 27. The company announced that it has garnered positive feedback from smart car manufacturers and users for its WISeCoin IoT cryptocurrency.
The next generation of IoT technology has increased its focus on the use of cryptocurrencies such as WISeCoin, for robotics, automation and machine to machine payments. The WISeCoin IoT CryptoCurrency benefits from WISeKey’s standardization and neutrality assets, key factors needed to achieve interoperability, and its vast experience in working with leading European automobile manufacturers to provide cybersecurity services for connected cars.
Presently, WISeKey, through its affiliate WISeKey QuoVadis, provides PKI Services to a growing number of smart car manufacturers. Its ISTANA PKI platform is already active in several large-scale projects.
Virtually all new cars on the market today include electronic technologies that could pose vulnerabilities to hacking or privacy intrusions if data security is not addressed. Gartner has estimated that the number of cars connected to the internet would grow to over a quarter of a billion by the year 2020. Therefore, smart car manufactures are working to identify and reduce potential hacking vulnerabilities in their vehicles.
In the past few years, the security protections of smart cars have expanded using proven IoT technologies. There is increased use of “secure element” chips provided by WISeKey Semiconductor to authenticate individual car components within the vehicle itself and to the online services it interacts with, and to ensure that only legitimate software is installed in the car.
The WISeCoin IoT CryptoCurrency Smart Payment allows the ability for connected objects secured by WISeKey Semiconductors to pay other connected objects using WISeCoin.
Notably, WISeKey has already tested the technology on connected cars allowing a connected car secured by WISeKey to pay for electricity, gas and parking through the integration of WISeCoin crypto wallets at the Secure Element Chip level.
VaultIC184 and Vault IC405S
Each connected object is equipped with WISeKey’s Secure Element, called VaultIC184, consisting of a tamper resistant silicon chip, based on a state-of-the-art secure microcontroller. VaultIC184 allows device manufacturers an easy integration of the chip, as well as a provisioning service, transferring the burden of device personalization to WISeKey’s secure Personalization Center.
For companies providing multi-network Internet of Things solutions, WISeKey is offering security module, VaultIC405S. It can operate on all network types to execute cryptocurrency payments between the connected objects. Designed for low cost, power and surface constrained devices, it proposes industry standard I2C connectivity, very low power consumption and a very small footprint.
VaultIC184 and VaultIC405S are part of WISeKey’s global end-to-end scalable security framework WISeKeyIoT, a Public Key Infrastructure based overall response designed to mitigate ever increasing risks of cyberattacks in IoT.
WISeCoin
WISeCoin is the native cryptocurrency of WISekey and the mode of payment between connected objects. WISeCoin uses the latest blockchain technology and works as part of payment system using WISeKey Blockchain-as-a-Service (“BaaS”) technology offerings.
To empower a seamless cryptocurrency enabled for IoT connections, WISeCoin is supplemented with highly secured solutions such as biometrics-driven hardware wallets, integrated exchange platforms, and NFC-based contactless payment solutions.
About WISeKey
WISeKey is a cybersecurity company currently deploying large scale digital identity ecosystems with a patented process. WISeKey’s Swiss based cryptographic Root of Trust (“RoT”) provides secure authentication and identification, in both physical and virtual environments, for the Internet of Things, Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence. The WISeKey RoT serves as a common trust anchor to ensure the integrity of online transactions among objects and between objects and people.
