Lacroix Electronics Implements Secured End-to-End Communications Over the Sigfox 0G Network on an Industrial IoT Demonstrator


Security is a major concern for all manufacturers of industrial IoT devices. As a provider of Electronic Manufacturing Services including the design, industrialization and manufacturing of electronic products and industrial IoT devices, LACROIX Electronics has always taken the security of the customers devices in consideration from the beginning of the project.

Thanks to its key partnerships with STMicroelectronics and Sigfox, LACROIX Electronics used pre-production samples of the latest STSAFE secure element from ST pre-configured for the Sigfox network.

The STSAFE hardware chip is dedicated to protecting critical data stored in an IoT device and provides automatic encryption and decryption of Sigfox packets, ensuring secured communications.

LACROIX Electronics announces today the successful implementation of an industrial IoT demonstrator that provides secured communications over the Sigfox low-power wide area network.

This demonstrator leverages hardware based on an ST evaluation kit with custom extensions, and a software stack integrated by another partner: Witekio.

Security of communications is enforced by the integration and use of a dedicated STSAFE secure element from ST to compatible modules from third-party partners like Murata, Jorjin and others.

STSAFE chips come pre-configured with Sigfox network credentials and can be easily integrated to any design or module using a Sigfox transceiver and the latest Sigfox protocol stack,” said Laurent Degauque, Marketing Director, Secure MCU Division, STMicroelectronics. “This guarantees secured communications for IoT devices using the Sigfox network with protection delivered by dedicated hardware.

By integrating our 0G network credentials directly on the factory floor dedicated to their security chip, STMicroelectronics ensures optimal security to Sigfox customers,” said Raouti Chehih, Chief Adoption Officer at Sigfox. “With this demonstrator, LACROIX Electronics is showing its ability to design and manufacture secured IoT devices for Sigfox customers.

Security of IoT devices is mainly ensured by cryptography artefacts, keys or certificates, which secret has to be kept and protected at all stages of the device lifecycle: development, manufacturing and operation  commissioning, use, decommissioning,” said Stéphane Gendrot, VP Business Development at LACROIX Electronics. “This experimentation program is strengthening our partnership with Sigfox, ST and Witekio. It is also enhancing our R&D work achieved in the past months where we have qualified IoT building blocks to optimize our responsiveness and competitiveness which answers our customer expectations when they entrust us with the development of their IoT or embedded systems.”