Qualcomm announced that its Snapdragon 855 has received Common Criteria EAL-4 + certification. It is a very important goal, as it stipulates that the level of security present in the SoC manufactured by Qualcomm is comparable to what could be achieved with a Smart Card.
This level of certification will allow manufacturers right away to take advantage of the trusted Snapdragon 855 area guaranteed by the Qualcomm Secure Processing Unit to store and protect data such as payment IDs, encryption keys and eSIM management systems, all without having to use additional dedicated hardware.
Until now, in fact, it was necessary to include an additional chip capable of guaranteeing the same level of security and meeting the requirements imposed by Google through its Gatekeeper and Android StrongBox protocols, if the manufacturer wants to equip its smartphone with advanced features such as those described.
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From now on, however, manufacturers will be able to take advantage of the trusted area of Snapdragon 855, thus simplifying the design phase and reducing development costs, since this meets all the best safety standards. The certification was also approved by the German authorities, passing the stringent BSI exams. During the Shanghai edition of MWC 2019 several practical demonstrations were held of how Snapdragon 855 can be used for payment management, integrated SIMs and more.
The interesting aspect of this certification is that its validity is retroactive – since the SoC has not received any changes since the time of its presentation – so we can imagine that smartphone manufacturers based on Snapdragon 855 can take advantage of this to update their terminals and then introduce advanced features related to the management of payments, cryptocurrencies and much more.
