From April 1 to 4, 2019, the Metering China Conference & Exhibition 2019 (MC 2019) hosted by MeteringChina.com, an international professional information platform in the energy metering field, was held in Wuxi, China. As a core supplier of IoT security chips, CEC Huada Electronic Design Co., Ltd. ("HED") was invited to attend the event and released the chip solution for IoT metering data security to assist the upgrade of the metering industry.

Mr. Li Dan, Sales Director of HED IoT Solutions, is releasing the chip solution for IoT metering data security

The metering industry in China has experienced three significant development stages: from mechanical metering to smart metering, and to the present IoT metering. The conventional mechanical metering has certain cost advantages; however, the manner of meter reading by personal visits is inconvenient to both the business and the users. Smart metering solved such problem of manual metering by using prepaid cards; however, users are required to go to specified locations to make purchases, and may frequently experience embarrassing conditions with the water, electricity, or gas supply suspended because the prepaid amount has been exhausted. IoT metering, emerged in the development of IoT technologies, supports multiple payment modes, including pre-payment and post-payment, and supports tiered pricing and remote control functions, hence solves many problems existing in conventional mechanical metering and smart metering devices. Using wireless networks for data transmission and remote control, IoT metering is facing more and more security threats, hence data security will definitely become a significant cornerstone for the future development of IoT metering.

City utilities, including water, electricity, gas, and heating supply, are vital to people’s quality of life and are the basis of people’s wellbeing. As a significant part of smart cities, smart, digital, and information-based public utilities have impacts on the social public interests, and the network and information security of public utilities has impacts on the sustainable economic and social development of cities. In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), while solving the issues in the smart, digital, and information aspects, IoT technologies face serious security threats in terms of the network and information security, such as data leakage due to attacks on the cloud, data tampering and theft due to attacks on the transmission link, and attacks on and hijacking of devices. HED works with partners to provide the IoT security solution for the industry of public utilities, so as to protect the data security of IoT metering, keep the property and privacy security of users, safeguard the healthy development of the smart metering industry, and assist in the smart, digital, and information-based transformation of public utilities.

As China’s core manufacturer of IoT security chips, HED provides complete IoT SE (secure element) chips and solutions for IoT fields, including smart metering, smart household appliances, and smart connected vehicles. Moreover, as a well-known manufacturer of chips for smart cards in China, HED has rich and mature experience in identification and data security, and its products are widely applied in financial payment, government public utilities, identification, telecommunications and mobile payments etc. at home and worldwide. In the field of smart metering, as a mainstream supplier of ESAM modules and security chips of prepaid cards for smart metering, HED has delivered over 500 million ships for smart metering. HED can provide complete smart metering solutions covering ESAM modules, security chips for prepaid cards, and NFC reader chips. In the era of the Internet of Things, HED took the lead in releasing IoT security SE chips; the process technologies applied allow the chips to meet the low-power consumption requirements in multiple IoT passive application scenarios, and to support China’s national cryptogram algorithms and pass high-level security tests of the State Cryptography Administration of China. By providing the secure operating environment, security algorithms, security interfaces, security SE chips can process, compute, and store data securely, so as to achieve credible identity authentication between IoT devices, encrypted data transmission, protection of sensitive information, etc.