Authentication Circuit is a dedicated hardware circuit that serves as the static core of the chain of trust, which is mandated by the highly regulated industries. When powered up, this circuit will first take control of the booting process and authenticates the boot firmware of the main hardware platform and allows it to boot only when its boot firmware is successfully authenticated.
NXP LPC 1820 is used as the MCU for this circuit, SHA256 and ECDSA p521 are used as the authentication algorithm suite.
We developed the whole firmware for this circuit which also supports the update of main platform boot firmware by exposing it as a mass storage device when the circuit is connected to a PC.