Shipments of processors that support TEE grow

“The Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) segment is expected to grow at a rapid pace: ABI Research calculates the total number of processor shipments that support TEE to reach 366 million by the end of 2014,” comments Monolina Sen, Senior Analyst. Governments, financial service providers, and other enterprises are selecting embedded security technologies to implement secure identification and payment applications. Embedded security technologies offer robust security features and are driven by vigorous demand in financial, transit, telecommunications, and identity applications. The ability to support authenticated and authorized information access combined with strong device security makes embedded security technologies a viable option for safeguarding personal information and consumer privacy. Although the market is still in its early stages, shipments supporting TEE and Host Card Emulation (HCE) are expected to dominate in 2014. With ARM integrating its TrustZone architecture into every Cortex-A family processor, ABI Research believes that more and more processors will support TEE, thereby offering device manufacturers integrated, hardware-based security. On the other hand, HCE can also help overcome some of the security challenges faced by service providers when implementing secure NFC services. HCE is a cloud-based mechanism that allows banks to launch mobile NFC products without needing to make use of the SIM or other secure elements. “Since its introduction in the KitKat version of the Android OS, HCE support in smartphones has been growing at a fast pace,” adds Sen. As a result, ABI Research calculates the number of smartphones shipments supporting HCE to reach 252 million by the end of 2014. Players like Oberthur Technologies, Trustonic, ARM, Nok Nok Labs, Mahindra Comviva, NXP Semiconductors, Giesecke & Devrient, Gemalto, Infineon Technologies, and others offer innovative and interesting offerings in the embedded security market.